Russia’s Defence Minister Anatoly Serdyukov was sacked on Tuesday over a massive corruption scandal in his agency.
President Vladimir Putin said he had fired Mr Serdyukov “to create conditions for an objective investigation” into a suspected $100 million property scam at a Defence Ministry agency.
Mr. Putin replaced Mr. Serdyukov, 50, with Moscow region governor Sergei Shoigu, 57.
Mr. Serdyukov lost his job less than a month after he visited India to co-chair with Defence Minister A. K. Antony an annual session of the Indo-Russian Inter-Governmental Commission for Military-Technical Cooperation, which was overshadowed by a fresh delay in the delivery of the INS Vikramaditya to India.
However, Mr. Serdyukov’s dismissal has entirely domestic reasons. It came two weeks after Russia’s top investigative committee raided the offices of Oboronservis, a holding company Mr Serdyukov set up, among other things, to dispose of the Defence Ministry’s excessive Soviet-era land property.
According to investigators, Oboronservis used state funds to build expensive properties on the Defence Ministry’s land and then sold them at rock-bottom prices to well-connected buyers.
Some analysts think the corruption scandal could just be a useful pretext for removing Mr Serdyukov, who antagonised the defence industry lobby by refusing to buy overpriced weapons and was hugely unpopular with the military. Mr Serdyukov, a former tax chief, had been appointed in 2007 to undertake a radical reform of the armed forces which involved mass retirement of ranking officers. Now that the most painful part of the reform has been completed, its architect was replaced with a more popular official. Mr Shoigu is credited with building up a highly efficient system of disaster management as a long-serving Minister of Emergency Situations.
via The Hindu Newspaper http://www.thehindu.com/news/international/putin-sacks-defence-minister/article4070851.ece
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