Good Cop, Mad Cop.(The Last Word)(National Anti-Corruption Committee's Kirill Kabanov)(Interview)

Byline: Kirill Kabanov

A specter is haunting Russia--the specter of corruption. President Dmitry Medvedev, who last spring said Russia is suffering from "legal nihilism," conceded last week that some government jobs can be bought. Kirill Kabanov's National Anti-Corruption Committee offers an answer. Kabanov investigated some of the Putin era's biggest corruption cases with the NGO after leaving the FSB, losing friends to various poisons along the way. He talked with NEWSWEEK's Anna Nemtsova about the blurry line between money and power in Moscow. Excerpts:

NEMTSOVA: WHAT is the National Anti- Corruption Committee?

KABANOV: It is a nongovernmental organization whose purpose is to investigate state corruption, Customs crime, money laundering and so forth. The members are politicians, businessmen inspired to do something about the system, journalists, lawyers and experts.

Does the Kremlin listen to you?

In his first public statement to the nation in 2000, Putin said government jobs should be occupied by professionals, otherwise the country would sink into corruption and stop being a democratic state. At the end of his eighth year, Putin admitted that corruption damaged all levels of the government. We had a hard time pushing our messages through to him. In 2003, our research showed that former secret police and military men occupied more than 51 percent of the leading state and business positions. Putin appointed his men to key positions. Cooperating with a few honest and brave people in the Interior Ministry, we investigated, and made public, statistics about corporate raiding and money laundering through state and foreign banks. Just to illustrate, according to our data, in Moscow alone banks laundered $100 million [per day].

What were your most successful investigations? Which suspects got punished?