Three Whales Corruption Scandal

Three Whales (Tri kita/Три кита) is a Moscow furniture shopping complex owned by Sergei Zuev. On August 13, 2000, Russian Customs inspectors suspended it and seized a furniture consignment supplied by the companies Bastion and Liga Mars, as they had allegedly smuggled 400 tons of furniture into Russia, while Zuev had evaded $5 million of customs duty by falsifying the price and weight of the imported goods. On October 20, 2000, Captain Pavel Zaitsev filed a criminal case against Liga Mars, initiated on September 7 by the Moscow Oblast Directorate of Internal Affairs. The customs inspectors found that the Three Whales shop was controlled by Yevgeny Zaostrovtsev, a former chief of now FSB Director Nikolai Patrushev and the father of FSB General Yury Zaostrovtsev, who at that time was the Head of the Economic Security Department and a Deputy Director of FSB. ==Prosecutor General's Office reaction==

In November 2000, the Prosecutor General's Office under Vladimir Ustinov halted the investigation and confiscated files related to the case. In December 2000 it charged Captain Pavel Zaitsev with abuse of office and claimed that he had conducted 12 searches without a prosecutor sanction and had illegally detained two suspects. On September 5, 2002, the Moscow City Court found Zaitsev not guilty on the charges. Later the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation canceled this decision, and on November 3, 2003 Pavel Zaitsev was sentenced by a Moscow court to two years of probation. Olga Kudeshkina, a judge who took part in the trial, said on December 1, 2003 that she was pressured to convict him, but refused to do so. In 2004, Kudeshkina lost her job. On May 7, 2001, First Deputy Prosecutor General Yury Biryukov signed a directive stopping the smuggling investigation, citing a lack of evidence. In Autumn 2001, the Prosecutor General's Office also accused Chief of the Customs Investigation Directorate Marat Fayzulin and Chief of the Customs Inspection Alexander Volkov with abuse of office and extortion of money from Sergei Zuev and an associate. On June 4, 2003, Fayzulin and Volkov were acquitted by a Moscow court. On October 15, 2001, at a press conference, the State Customs Committee claimed that it had discovered a smuggling network organized by Sergei Zuev. Customs officially charged him with customs duty evasion. ==Parliamentary commission==

Two deputies of the State Duma and members of the State Duma Security Committee, Yury Shchekochikhin, a journalist, and Alexander Gurov, Lieutenant General of Interior Affairs, launched a parliamentary inquiry into the case which was approved by the State Duma on March 13, 2002. The Prosecutor General's Office rejected all the accusations of corruption, claiming that the investigation had been closed for legitimate reasons. In April 2002 Shchekochikhin, Gurov, and Nikolay Kovalyov, another State Duma deputy and a former FSB head, asked Vladimir Putin to intervene. Eventually the inquiry forced the Prosecutor General's Office to resume investigation of the smuggling. A prosecutor from Leningrad Oblast, Vladimir Loskutov, was chosen by President Vladimir Putin personally to lead the investigation of the affair. Immediately after this he received a death threat. On June 2, 2003, he published another article in that newspaper in which he accused the Prosecutor General's Office and Biryukov personally of corruption: ==Possible victims==

Several individuals involved in investigating the Three Whales case have suffered threats and assaults or died under suspicious circumstances. Mr. Vorobiov, Head of Central Operative Customs, who initiated Criminal Case 27400-22/2000 after finding out about the fictitious Liga Mars company, was assaulted in February 2002. On July 3, 2003, Yury Shchekochikhin died a few days after he had been hospitalized, according to Russian officials, from a suddenly developed allergy of unknown origin. His relatives were denied an official medical report about the cause of his illness, and were forbidden from taking specimens of his tissue to conduct an independent medical investigation. The possibility that he was poisoned has been widely considered. Shchekochikhin's colleague in the Duma, Aleksandr Gurov, was never asked to witness, according to Novaya Gazeta's chief editor Dmitry Muratov. Also in 2003, Andrey Saenko, another key witness, was severely injured in an assassination attempt. Customs investigators Mikhail Vanin and Colonel General Boris Gutin lost their jobs in 2004. ==2006 arrests and government bodies reshuffle==

The dismissal in May 2006 of Alexander Zherikhov, head of the Federal Custom Service, as well as some other FSB, Interior Ministry and Prosecutor General's Office officials, is linked by many to the Three Whales scandal. Later Yekaterina Leladze, Anatoly Melnichuk, founder of Liga Mars, Valery Belyakov and Pavel Polyakov (by default) were also charged. The businesspeople were charged with grand smuggling by an organized group, exceptionally grand custom duty evasion and grand legalization of smuggled goods by an organized group (art.188 part 4, art. 194 part 2, art. 174 part 3 of the Russian Criminal Code). On June 15, in Shanghai, President Vladimir Putin told journalists that he had asked Vladimir Loskutov, a prosecutor from Leningrad Oblast and a former classmate of his, to take on the case, as the President couldn't trust the Moscow offices of law-enforcement agencies. Prosecutor General's Office, Moscow Regional Prosecutor's Office, Federal Customs Service and Presidential Executive Office. Deputy heads of the FSB Internal Security Department also figured in the report authored by Viktor Cherkesov. The purge has occurred while FSB head Nikolai Patrushev was on vacations. Vladimir Vdovin, Deputy Chairman of the Russian Federal Property Fund, has also resigned after 12 years in office on September 19, 2006, officially because of a change of job, but it was rumored that his dismissal was linked to the Three Whales case. == References ==