Duma deputy asks Medvedev to follow up on anti-corruption activists’ probe into deputy PM’s suspicious travel spending

Duma deputy Oleg Shein, a member of one of Russia’s nominally opposition parties, has formally asked Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev to open an inquiry into First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov’s use of government money, in light of an investigative report released yesterday by the Anti-Corruption Foundation.

In his request, Shein reminds Medvedev that civil servants must exercise patience and respect Russia’s national traditions. In his open letter to the prime minister, Shein, a leftist, argues that it goes against Russia’s national traditions for a state official to transport dogs in a private plane.

The Anti-Corruption Foundation, led by opposition leader Alexey Navalny, found 13 “coincidences” in which the airplane Bombardier Global Express happened to be in the same cities as Igor Shuvalov on the same days. The cities included Vladivostok, where Shuvalov recently participated in a forum, and Kazan, where he spoke about particularly small apartments in Moscow.

The team also determined that Shuvalov used an airplane to travel to his family’s mansion in Salzburg, Austria, 18 times this year, and estimates that the cost of these trips to amounts to roughly 100 million rubles ($1.6 million).

Finally, the team discovered that corgis (Welsh herding dogs) raised by Shuvalov’s wife also travel on this airplane, as, on eight occasions, the jet happened to turn up in cities that were holding Corgi dog shows at the time.

Early last week, Navalny accused Shuvalov of buying ten adjacent apartments on the 14th floor of Moscow’s Kotelnicheskaya Embankment Building to create an impressive 719-square-meter (7,740-square-feet) 600-million-ruble ($9.4 million) apartment.