MOSCOW, December 11 (RIA Novosti) – A grassroots anti-plagiarism group said Tuesday that the head of the Kremlin’s newly created anti-corruption department ripped off a significant portion of his doctoral thesis.
Oleg Plokhoi – whose name, incidentally, means “bad” in Russian – defended his dissertation at the Federal Prison Service’s in-house judicial academy in 2006.
But Dissernet.org claimed that about 62 of 152 pages in the thesis on staffing principles of Russian law enforcements had been borrowed from other books without proper attribution.
Plokhoi, 45, who was appointed to his job last week by President Vladimir Putin, had not commented on the group’s allegations as of this article’s publication.
He served in the KGB and its successor, the FSB, prior to joining the Kremlin administration in 1999.
Dissernet.org was formed in 2011 and bases its studies on digital text analysis services. It has identified what it says is theft of written work by numerous high-ranking officials, including Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, Investigative Committee head Alexander Bastrykin and several federal legislators.
Most have denied allegations of plagiarism.
