Bitcoin bribe worth $73 mln lands Russian investigator in jail
Adds details on case in paragraphs 2-5
MOSCOW, Oct 8 (Reuters) -A former Russian state investigator was jailed for 16 years on Tuesday for taking bribes - mostly in bitcoin -equivalent to around $73 million.
Russian media said the amountthat Marat Tambiyev was accused of receiving was five times larger than the previous record for a bribery case in the country's modern history. He was found guilty ofaccepting the moneyfrom members of an organised crime group he was investigating.
Rather than seizing thecrime group's assets, the prosecution said, Tambiyev arranged for more than half its bitcoin fortune to be transferredto his own crypto wallets, for which the access codes were discovered in a file named "Pension" on his laptop. The suspects were allowed to keep the rest.
Tambiyev protested his innocence, saying he had been framed and that his actions had actually enabled the state to recover some of the criminal funds.
Kommersant newspaper reported that more than a third of the bitcoin in the "Pension" file had been retrieved by the authorities. It was not clear what had happened to the rest.
Kristina Lyakhovenko, a lower-ranked colleague of Tambiyev, was jailed for nine years as part of the same case. Lawyers for both the defendantssaid they would appeal.
Russia is currently pursuing a spate of high-profile bribery investigations, many involving senior figures in the military.
Reporting by Mark Trevelyan
Editing by Gareth Jones
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