In an interview published Friday in the weekly Argumenty i Fakty, the head of the Finance Ministry's auditing department said that the Gorbachev Foundation had hidden profits, withheld taxes and failed to meet proper accounting standards.
Also on Friday, President Boris Yeltsin's press office revealed to Polish journalists the contents of a top secret memorandum signed by Gorbachev on Feb. 22, 1990, which indicated that the Soviet president then knew the details of the 1940 massacre of 25, 000 Polish officers in the Katyn forest.
In a letter sent last week to President Lech Walesa of Poland, Gorbachev reiterated that he had learned the truth about the massacre only in his last days as president, and that he had encouraged Yeltsin to make it public.
Despite his problems in Moscow, Gorbachev left Friday afternoon for Berlin, where he attended the funeral Saturday of former Chancellor Willy Brandt. It was his first trip out of the country since the government slapped a travel ban on him Oct. 1 for his refusal to testify in a Constitutional Court case on the legality of the Communist Party. He Was due back in Moscow Monday
Gorbachev and Yeltsin's feud sharpened last week. The former Kremlin leader was forced to cancel a trip to Italy and was then accused of leading a Communist Party coverup of the Katyn massacre.
In a press conference last week, Gorbachev said that he learned the truth about the Katyn massacre only two days before his resignation as Soviet president last December. At that time, he said, he read the document with his aide, Alexander Yakovlev, and then handed it over to Yeltsin, urging him to make it public.
But the 1990 memo, penned by Valentin Falin, the former chief of the Communist Party Central Committee's international department, informed Gorbachev that the killings had been carried out by Stalin's security forces, the NKVD, under the supervision of Lavrenty Beria, according to Itar-Tass.
In Argumenty i Fakty, Yury Danilevsky, a Finance Ministry official, wrote that a recent audit of the Gorbachev Foundation had found several violations.
Among them, the foundation failed by Jan. 1, 1992, to turn over 6. 4 million rubles, worth $300, 000 at the time, of Communist Party funds to the Russian government, according to Danilevsky.
The funds had been in the bank account of the Communist Party school that used to occupy the office space on Leningradsky Prospekt that was turned over to the Foundation by a personal agreement between Yeltsin and Gorbachev.
Gorbachev Foundation spokesman. Vladimir Polyakov told The Associated Press that Argumenty i Fakty had published only portions of the audit and said they had been taken out of context.
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