Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed...

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed Thursday a decree to streamline the law enforcement structure, in particular ordering staff cuts and instituting the rotation of senior personnel at the Interior Ministry.

MOSCOW, July 31 (RIA Novosti) - A Russian...

MOSCOW, July 31 (RIA Novosti) - A Russian regional court has given a deputy director of a local branch of Russia"s Civil Service Academy a 3 1/2 year suspended sentence for bribery. The court in Vladimir, to the east of Moscow, found Vladimir Starostin, a professor at the Academy"s management department, guilty of receiving a 100,000 ruble ($4,200) bribe in February this year from an applicant for helping him to become a student, local prosecutors said. The judgment comes as Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed a plan on Thursday to counter Russia"s rampant corruption. The president, a former lawyer, has made the fight against corruption one of his top priorities, signing a decree setting up a presidential anti-corruption council just two weeks after his inauguration.

MOSCOW, June 26 (RIA Novosti) - Russia lost...

MOSCOW, June 26 (RIA Novosti) - Russia lost 413 million rubles ($16 million) in the first five months of 2007 as a result of money laundering, an Interior Ministry official said Tuesday. Yevgeny Shkolov, head of the ministry"s economic security department, said his unit alone tracked down some 2,680 money-laundering incidents between January and May of this year - a 14% increase year-on-year. The total number of such crimes detected across the nation was 4,390, he said. "Some 4,390 crimes related to money laundering were tracked in the Russian Federation in the first five months of this year, including 1,257 on a large scale," Shkolov said.