Khakassia’s top narcotics officer jailed for eight years for a bitcoin-bribe

The former head of the Khakassia Interior Ministry’s drug-control department has been found guilty of receiving a bribe in cryptocurrency worth 52,000 rubles and of disclosing state secrets. The press service reports that Krasnoyarsk Krai’s Investigative Committee said.

According to investigators, in December 2018 the law enforcement officer received a bribe from the administrator of the online drug-store Killer Diller in exchange for information about planned arrests. He also promised to help apprehend a person who had stolen part of the drug stashes through which the shop distributed its product.

The case was opened in March 2019, a month after the police officer was dismissed from his post for ‘a misconduct that disgraced the honour of a police officer’.

According to the former officer’s wife, he had repeatedly complained to the republican Interior Ministry about the leadership of the Khakassia drug-control agency’s involvement in illegal drug trafficking.

After the arrest in March 2019 of the former police officer, he was detained and six months later placed under house arrest.

However, in November 2019, after the publication on YouTube of his appeal to President Vladimir Putin about the work of the drug police, the detained officer was again remanded to the pre-trial detention center.

In the video he said that the department’s head Evgeny Lysyh and his deputies embedded trusted agents in online shops and received money from drug sales. The informants supplied them with addresses of other drug outlets, enabling the department to increase its clearance rate.

The republican Interior Ministry called this ‘an attempt to influence the course of the investigation and to discredit police officers’.

For publishing on YouTube correspondence with a drug dealer from materials in his case, the former police officer was charged with disclosure of state secrets.

In September 2020, the Khakassia Supreme Court sentenced the former police officer to eight years in a general-regime penal colony and a fine of 156,000 rubles.

Earlier in April 2019, a former FSB investigator, Alexey Kolbov, was detained on suspicion of extorting $1 million in bitcoins. Along with a partner he demanded money from Alexander Galumov, the son of former Izvestia editor Erast Galumov, who was accused of fraud related to investment contracts.

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