A grassroots anti-plagiarism group has accused the head of the Kremlin's newly created anti-corruption department of cheating on his doctoral thesis.
Oleg Plokhoi, whose name means "bad" in Russian, defended his dissertation at the Federal Penitentiary Service's in-house judicial academy in 2006.
But Dissernet.org said Tuesday that about 62 of the thesis' 152 pages on staffing principles of Russian law enforcements had been borrowed from other books without proper attribution.
Plokhoi, 45, who was appointed to his job last week by President Vladimir Putin, had not commented on the allegations by the time of this article's publication.
He served in the KGB and its successor, the FSB, prior to joining the Kremlin administration in 1999.
Dissernet.org was formed in 2011 and bases its studies on digital text analysis services. It has identified what it says is the theft of written work by numerous high-ranking officials, including Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, Investigative Committee head Alexander Bastrykin and several federal legislators.
Most have denied allegations of plagiarism.