A court in the Russian Tula Region on Friday sanctioned the arrest of the head of the regional land department on suspicion of demanding a 40 million ruble ($1.3 million) bribe, investigators said.
Viktor Volkov, the director of the Tula Region's Department of Land and Property Relations, is accused of soliciting the bribe in exchange for allowing the construction of a hypermarket on a plot of land in the city of Tula, said Zinaida Kaminskaya, senior assistant to the region's chief investigator.
She said the judge in Tula's Sovetsky District Court approved investigators' request to detain Volkov.
A criminal case has been opened under the section of the Criminal Coder covering "an attempt to receive a large-scale bribe." Investigators did not say from whom the alleged bribe was solicited.
Malls and hypermarkets have sprung up in Moscow and other major cities over the past decade, but there have been reports of corruption.
The most publicized example involve Sweden's Ikea, which admitted in February that two of its senior managers in Russia had agreed to pay bribes "related to power supply to Ikea-owned MEGA shopping centers in St. Petersburg."
TULA, January 7 (RIA Novosti)
