Emotional assessment of Defense Ministry's corruption case leads to outrage - Peskov
MOSCOW. Dec 9 (Interfax) - Russian President Vladimir Putin's press secretary Dmitry Peskov has opposed emotional assessments of the corruption scandal at the Defense Ministry.
"Legally speaking, one must not plunge into emotions. They can be called thieves only if a court brands them such. Letting oneself be carried away with emotions would lead to an outrage," he told presidential election agents in Moscow on Sunday.
Five criminal cases were opened in late October on the charges of fraud at the Defense Ministry's Oboronservice, which did damage of more than 3 billion rubles.
The Oboronservice embezzlement case has seven episodes now with regard to 14 property items. The total damage is estimated at 6.7 billion rubles. The Russian Investigative Committee is probing two criminal cases related to the Defense Ministry: Oboronservice and Slavyanka.
Two suspects have been arrested in the Oboronservice case - Expert Legal Support Center head Yekaterina Smetanova and her common-law husband Maxim Zakutailo, former general director of the Air Force/Air Defense Moscow District Warehouse. Charges are brought in three episodes against Smetanova and in two episodes against Zakutailo. A serious fraud charge (Part 3, Article 159 of the Russian Criminal Code) has been brought against former head of the Defense Ministry's property department Yevgenia Vasilyeva. She was put under house arrest for two months on November 23.
The president fired Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov on November 6 "to create conditions for an objective inquiry" into the Oboronservice embezzlement case.