Putin proposes loosening penalties for small bribes

© RIA Novosti, Alexei Druzhinin

12:54 01/12/2014

MOSCOW, December 1 (RAPSI) – President Vladimir Putin has proposed lowering fines for minor corruption-related violations, Interfax reports on Monday. A bill to this effect has been forwarded to the State Duma.

The current penalty for accepting a bribe worth up to 25,000 rubles (about $540) is a fine that is 25 to 50 times larger than the bribe. According to the bill, the upper limit for the fine should be 1 million rubles ($21,540).

The bill also stipulates alternative penalties such as correctional labor and a fixed fine combined with a ban on holding certain offices for up to three years.

The law on fines that are many times larger than the related bribe was signed by then President Dmitry Medvedev in May 2011. In February 2014, Supreme Court Chairman Vyacheslav Lebedev said the majority of the offenders who were to be fined went unpunished: of the 25 billion rubles (about $540 million) in fines approved by courts in 2013, only 3.5 billion rubles ($75 million) have been collected.