15 October 2016, 21:48 GMT
MOSCOW (Sputnik) — Media reported in September that the government planned to create a State Security Ministry based on the Federal Security Service (FSB), the main security agency. The new ministry would reportedly take over inquiries into high-profile criminal cases and act as an internal oversight body.
"It is a one-hundred-percent fake! There is no state security ministry under consideration and never will be, I assure you," Ivanov told the Russian Komsomolskaya Pravda online newspaper. "There are enough security agencies."
According to reports, an alleged reshuffle of security and law enforcement agencies was to be completed by the time of the next presidential elections in March 2018. It would also merge the service protecting the president and high-level state officials with the intelligence agency, which Ivanov said did not have any sense.
