Article author:
Reuters
Moscow — Russia's leading economist Vladimir Mau has been charged with "especially large-scale" fraud, shocking Russia's academic and economic elite, the Ministry of Interior said Thursday.
He said he was accused of embezzling funds from the institute, the president, as part of a larger case involving another top scholar and a former deputy minister of education.
Mau, 62, is an economic liberal with close ties to top policy makers and a board member of Russia's energy giant Gazprom.
He frequently appears in the expert panel of the St. Petersburg Forum, an annual showcase event for business and finance in Russia, for economic "shock therapy". It was a companion to the late Yegor Gaidar. Russia's reforms after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Reuters was unable to contact Lau or his spokesperson. State news agency Tass said he was detained, and Interfax said investigators were asking him to be under house arrest.
In a shocking post on social media, political scientist Ekaterina Shulman expressed her solidarity with Mau and wrote:
The Ministry of Interior said an anti-corruption investigator had searched Lau's house and employees of his institute, the National Academy of Economics and Administration of the Russian Presidential Academy.
The ministry said the allegations were broader than the previous arrests of former Deputy Minister of Education Marina Lakova and Sergei Zuev, the president of a prestigious academic institution like Mau. Said to be part of.
Opposition figures criticize the case as the latest episode of a long-running Kremlin campaign to dominate Russia's educational sphere and shatter academic freedom. (Report by Reuters, Written by Mark Trevelyan, Edited by Allison Williams)
