A senior Russian pensions official has been sentenced to ten years in a penal colony and hit with a fine of 950,000 roubles (about US$ 17,600) for accepting bribes worth more than 47 million roubles (US$ 1.8 million).

A court in St. Petersburg convicted the former head of the pension fund of the St Petersburg and Leningrad region, Natalya Grishkevich, of accepting huge kickbacks from a banker.

The court heard that Grishkevich accepted more than 47 million roubles (US$ 1.8 million) from Alexander Gitelson, head of the East-European Finance Corporation (VEFK Bank).

In May 2006, Grishkevich agreed with Gitelson to transfer funds earmarked for pensions into an account with VEFK.

Transferring these funds into the VEFK account, which had an average minimum balance of at least a billion roubles (US$ 18.5 million), enabled Gitelson skim off cash.

In return for Grishkevich’s cooperation, Gitelson paid the 56-year-old more than 47 million roubles (about US$ 1.8 million) in bribes.

Russian federal law stipulates that pension funds must be kept in the accounts of the pension fund of the Russian Federation in the Central Bank.

Grishkevich, an economics scholar, was suspended from office following her arrest in February 2010, Lenta.rureports.

The former civil servant had previously been honored by the Russian state on several occasions, including being awarded the Order of Catherine the Great in 2007.

In April 2013, Gitelson was extradited from Austria on charges of embezzling almost 2 billion roubles (US$ 37 million) from the Leningrad regional government budget.

The former banker was found guilty of large-scale fraud by the Vasileostrovskiy District Court of St. Petersburg in March this year. He was sentenced to three years imprisonment and ordered to pay a fine of 500 thousand roubles (about US$ 9,200).

occrp.org