Three Whales Corruption Scandal
On October 20, 2000, Captain Pavel Zaitsev filed a criminal case against Liga Mars, initiated on September 7 by the Moscow Oblast Directorate of Internal Affairs.In December 2000 it charged Captain Pavel Zaitsev with abuse of office and claimed that he had conducted 12 searches without a prosecutor sanction and had illegally detained two suspects.[1] This situation as a whole was widely considered an episode of the struggle between Boris Yeltsin's "Family", represented by the State Customs Committee chairman Mikhail Vanin, a close ally of Alexander Voloshin and Roman Abramovich, and security services personnel, known as siloviki.Vanin apparently lost the battle, as he left his position during the government reshuffle initiated in March 2004 by Vladimir Putin, when the Customs Committee was incorporated into the Economy Ministry of Russia.[1][5] Earlier that year, on February 18, 2002, Shchekochikhin had published a detailed article in Novaya Gazeta on the smuggling affair and corruption in the Interior Ministry and the Prosecutor General's Office.[23][24][25] On June 2, 2003, he published another article in that newspaper in which he accused the Prosecutor General's Office and Biryukov personally of corruption:[26] Several individuals involved in investigating the Three Whales case have suffered threats and assaults or died under suspicious circumstances.[29] The dismissal in May 2006 of Alexander Zherikhov, head of the Federal Custom Service, as well as some other FSB, Interior Ministry and Prosecutor General's Office officials, is linked by many to the Three Whales scandal.[5][50][51][52][53] Vladimir Vdovin, Deputy Chairman of the Russian Federal Property Fund, has also resigned after 12 years in office on September 19, 2006, officially because of a change of job, but it was rumored that his dismissal was linked to the Three Whales case.