Investigator of Russian Investigative Committee's Moscow branch, lawyer charged with soliciting bribe
MOSCOW. Aug 7 (Interfax) - An investigator of the Investigative Committee's Moscow branch and her accomplice, a lawyer, have been on trial for soliciting a 10-million-ruble bribe from a person under investigation.
"The Moscow Prosecutor's Office has endorsed an indictment in a criminal case of Moscow residents: a 30-year-old senior investigator of one of the inter-district investigative departments and a 56-year-old lawyer," the Moscow Prosecutor's Office told Interfax on Tuesday.
Investigators charged them with receiving a bribe and soliciting a massive bribe.
According to investigators, the investigator had ordered to charge a Moscow resident with massive fraud and forgery of documents.
"The investigator then demanded that the defendant hand over 10 million rubles for facilitating the imposition of a restrictive measure in the form of house arrest and the termination of the criminal proceeding after the handover of the entire amount of the bribe. Fearing criminal prosecution and wanting to conceal the illegal nature of her actions, she involved her acquaintance, a lawyer, in the crime," it said.
She demanded that the defendant sign a bogus contract with the lawyer for the provision of legal assistance with payment of remuneration equivalent to the amount of the bribe, 10 million rubles, in order to give a veneer of legality to her actions, the agency said.
Having forced the defendant to hand over the bribe, the lawyer received the first $10,000, which was over 547,000 rubles under the Russian Central Bank's exchange rate, and shared it with the investigator on March 25, 2017.
"Subsequently, the lawyer personally received from the defendant, who took part in the operative and search measures, another part of the required bribe totaling $10,000 and dummy cash imitating $80,000. Law enforcement officers detained the lawyer after he received the money," it said.
The criminal case was forwarded to Moscow's Savyolovsky District Court. The investigator was taken into custody as a restrictive measure, and the lawyer is under house arrest, the prosecutor's office said.
An informed source has told Interfax that the indicted persons are the senior investigator of the Investigative Committee's Butyrsky inter-district investigative department, Maria Androsova, and lawyer Yury Podkhvatilovsky.