Page 68 - bneMag February 2021_20210202

68 Opinion
bne February 2021
General Prosecutor Igor Krasnov (left) and Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin (right) STOLYPIN:
Corruption steals back into
the Russian political agenda
as Mishustin and Krasnov
target the institutional profiteers
Mark Galeotti, director of the consultancy Mayak Intelligence,
an honorary professor at UCL School of Slavonic & East European Studies
General Prosecutor Igor Krasnov has been busy. On 9 December, he chaired a conclave of the heads of law enforcement agencies on the implementation of the National Anti-Corruption Plan for 2018-2020. He tempered the usual self-congratulatory rhetoric with an admission that much still needed to be done and presented a shopping list of necessary measures, from greater powers to confiscate
he property of corrupt officials, that not least property that has been moved abroad, and to target profiteering within state structures.
The day before, he had given a set-piece interview in Rossiiskaya Gazeta, the government newspaper emerging as the Pravda of late Putinism, the place to find Kremlin policy encoded between the lines. He again highlighted kick-backs in state procurement as an area that needed
www.bne.eu
serious attention, something that chimes with a whole series of recent incidents and initiatives being pushed by Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin.
Whereas Mishustin’s predecessor Dmitry Medvedev had an at-best awkward relationship with former General Prosecutor Yuri Chaika, the Mishustin-Krasnov partnership may prove more productive. And that could mean serious progress addressing corruption – albeit up to a point.
The Genprok
Krasnov’s appointment at the start of 2020 was an interesting move. Chaika had served in the post for fourteen years
in which progress in addressing corruption was often tempered by the enthusiastic prosecution of political cases. Furthermore, there was a steady stream of rumours about