Extraordinary bribes in Belarus
Head of the referee department of the Belarusian Football Federation Andrei Zhukau stood trial in Minsk on November 30. The sports functionary was accused of bribery: he was suspected of accepting bribes from coaches for assigning the needed referees to matches of the Belarusian championship. The sums of $100, $200, €100 euro and 50 BYN were mentioned alongside with a bottle of Ararat cognac. The following clubs were involved in the case: Smarhon, BATE and Tarpeda-BelAZ.
Bribes are usually given in the form of money in Belarus. However, the reasons for the bribers are rather strange sometimes: a man put $100 in his passport at the Ukrainian border so that the frontier gaurds would ignore the fact that he was transporting two peacocks. However, there were some unusual bribes too.
Ice cream for official checkup of motor vehicles
A 38-year-old engineer from Orsha used to help his acquaintances pass the official checkup of motor vehicles for money and ice cream. The man ignored cracks on the windscreen and even malfunctioning brakes for sweet bribes. The police arrested the engineer when he let them pass the checkup for 20 roubles. It is not clear how much ice cream the bribe-taker ate at work.
Food and alcohol for good marks
The head of a chair of Mazyr Pedagogical University was detained for an attempt ‘to sell’ good marks to correspondence students in exchange for 800 roubles. The woman agreed to accept part of the sum in the form of food and alcohol.
An official from Lida District Executive Committee used to accept food and alcohol for his services. They were arrested in 2015. The heads of district shops bribed him. They gave him everything they had in the shop windows!
20 liters of petrol and you can drive as you like
A driving inspector stopped a car that was moving in the wrong direction along a one-way street. The driver asked the 34-year-old inspector to let him go and promised to fuel his car at the expense of the Education Department. The inspector agreed and got 20 litres of petrol a week later. He was sentenced to 4 years of correctional labour six months later.
A box of nails. Just a box of nails
Alyaksandr Lukashenka, an ordinary MP, reported that Belarusian PM Stanislau Shushkevich had misappropriated a box of nails in 1993. Shushkevich had to resign after that. The fight against corruption helped Lukashenka please voters and win the presidential election six months later.
Reference:
485 people were convicted for corruption in 2015. It is twice more than in 2014.
