TULA, July 22 (RIA Novosti) - A court in Russia's Tula Region sentenced the former governor to 9 ½ years in prison Monday after finding him guilty of taking a 40 million ruble ($1.2 million) bribe.
The court also ordered former governor Vyacheslav Dudka to pay a fine of 900,000 rubles ($27,800).
Dudka's co-defendant, Viktor Volkov, was sentenced to 2 ½ years in prison after the court found him guilty on the same counts.
According to investigators, in November 2010, then governor Dudka and Volkov, who headed the regional property and land management department, took a 40 million ruble kickback from the GRINN corporation, in return for leasing it a plot of land in Tula for three years for the corporation to build a supermarket there.
The prosecution had previously called for Dudka, who served as Tula Region governor between 2005 and 2011, to be sentenced to 9 ½ years in prison and Volkov to four years.
The Russian government has been campaigning for years to stamp out corruption among officials, but with little apparent success. The number of corruption-related crimes recorded in Russia rose by almost 25 percent in 2012, according to a report by the Prosecutor General’s Office submitted to parliament in April.
(Updated with new headline, lead, court’s sentences and last para)
