Russian Prosecutor Gets Nine Years For Bribery
Dmitry Dovgy in court in August 2008
June 30, 2009
MOSCOW (Reuters) -- A former Russian prosecutor who led a politically charged corruption investigation has been sentenced to nine years in prison for taking a bribe, a court official said.
Dmitry Dovgy had led the investigation of Sergei Storchak, deputy finance minister and Russia's foreign-debt negotiator who was arrested in November 2007 on embezzlement charges widely seen as an attack on liberal Finance Minister Aleksei Kudrin.
Dovgy, top investigator of the Prosecutor-General's Investigative Committee, was arrested in August and charged with taking a 750,000-euro ($1.06 million) bribe in another case.
A jury last week found him guilty of accepting the bribe. On June 30 a Moscow City Court judge sentenced him to nine years in a high-security prison, court spokeswoman Anna Usachyova said.
Another former prosecutor, Andrei Sagura, who was charged with receiving the bribe on Dovgy's behalf, was sentenced to eight years in prison on June 29, Usachyova said.
Storchak, who denied the charges, was released in October after spending nearly a year in jail pending trial. He is still to face court over charges of trying to embezzle $43 million in a debt deal with Algeria.