The former anti-corruption chief of the Sverdlovsk region has been sentenced to 4 years in prison after being found guilty of accepting a bribe of 217 million rubles ($2.7 million), a court in Yekaterinburg said Thursday.
Andrei Dyakov, who headed the regional Interior Ministry’s anti-corruption unit, was detained alongside other law enforcement officials in May 2024. Dyakov entered a plea deal and testified against other suspects, including the region’s former top tax official, who remains at large.
Yekaterinburg’s Leninsky District Court sentenced Dyakov to 4 years in a high-security penal colony after finding him guilty of aggravated bribery and abuse of power by a public official.
Dyakov was also stripped of his police rank and banned from holding public office for 8 years.
The prison sentence has not entered into force and is subject to appeal, according to a statement on the court’s social media page.
Investigators accused Dyakov of providing cover to entrepreneurs who were illegally reclaiming value-added tax from the federal budget.
Prosecutors said Dyakov had accepted 17 million rubles from one businessman and 200 million rubles from the founder of a major telecommunications company.
In his final statement to the court, Dyakov acknowledged his actions but claimed he did not act out of personal gain, saying he had intended to help the service and his colleagues.
Local media link the case to a wider corruption probe involving the former daughter-in-law of former Yekaterinburg mayor Arkady Chernetsky, who served from 1992 to 2010.
He served as a Russian senator between 2010 and 2021 and is the current first deputy chairman of the Sverdlovsk region’s legislative assembly.
Anastasia Chernetskaya is accused of orchestrating large-scale fraud in telecommunications company TTK-Yekaterinburg.
Chernetskaya was released from house arrest in February this year.
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