Putin is recognized as the chief corruption of the year

An independent journalistic project to investigate corruption (OCCRP) recognized President of Russia Vladimir Putin as "a person of the year-2014". As stated in the organization’s message, Putin "is a real innovator in working with organized crime."

Putin was recognized as the “man of the year” for turning the country into a center for laundering money, the spread of the sphere of influence of criminal groups on Crimea and Donbass, as well as the failure of anti -corruption work and the use of criminal groups as part of state policy, Deutsche Welle notes .

"He created a military-industrial-political-criminal complex to defend the interests of Russia and his own. It seems to me that Putin believes that these interests coincide," writes OCCRP, Drew Sullivan.

According to him, the connections of criminal groups with the authorities exist around the world, but Putin managed to institutionalize this phenomenon. "For years, Putin created buffer states under the control of gangster groups - such as Transnistria, Ossetia, Abkhazia, and now Crimea and Donbass," writes Sullivan.

In addition, the OCCRP report notes the closure of the media and civil associations that investigate cases of corruption in Russia. According to the organization, the Russian authorities completed the current year "with irony": recognizing the opposition Alexei Navalny guilty of corruption.

Putin's main rivals in the struggle for the title of "man of the year in corruption" were Prime Minister of Hungary and Montenegro Viktor Orban and Milo Dzhukanovich. In 2013, the Parliament of Romania was recognized as the “main corruption”, in 2012 - President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev.