Experts discuss conclusions made by General Prosecutor's Office about high level of corruption in Astrakhan Region

According to the General Prosecutor's Office of Russia, the Astrakhan Region has entered the top three most corrupted Russian regions. According to the supervisory authority, in the first half of 2016, the Astrakhan Region faced a more than double increase in the number of registered crimes related to bribery. According to the report, in January-June 2016, the number of such crimes reached 74, while in the first half of 2015, there were only 36 of them.

After studying the published data from the report prepared by the General Prosecutor's Office, the experts of the international organization leading the fight against corruption "Transparency International" have rated them as biased. This was told to the "Caucasian Knot" correspondent by Gleb Gavrish, a member of the "Transparency International".

According to him, based on their own analysis of the statistics of the General Prosecutor's Office, the experts have concluded that the situation with corruption in the Astrakhan Region does no differ from other Russian regions.

The presented statistics cannot objectively reflect the level of corruption in the region. This opinion was also shared by Georgy Satarov, President of the Foundation for Applied Political Studies "INDEM", a member of the public expert council of the World Bank on issues of governance and corruption.

According to him, with such a change in criminal statistics, even if it is collected in good faith, it is impossible to establish the cause of the dynamics recorded: whether it is connected with a real increase in the number of crimes or with improvement of the quality of law enforcers' work.

Georgy Satarov believes that in Russia, the situation with statistics is extremely bad, since the authorities are not interested in the assessment of the real state of affairs in the country.

Full text of the article is available on the Russian page of 24/7 Internet agency ‘Caucasian Knot’.