Bitcoin bribe worth $73 million lands Russian investigator in jail

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A former Russian state investigator was jailed for 16 years on Tuesday for taking bribes - mostly in bitcoin - equivalent to around $73 million.

Russian media said the amount that Marat Tambiyev was accused of receiving was five times larger than the previous record for a bribery case in the country's modern history. He was found guilty of accepting the money from members of an organised crime group he was investigating.

Rather than seizing the crime group's assets, the prosecution said, Tambiyev arranged for more than half its bitcoin fortune to be transferred to his own crypto wallets, for which the access codes were discovered in a file named "Pension" on his laptop. The suspects were allowed to keep the rest.

Tambiyev protested his innocence, saying he had been framed and that his actions had actually enabled the state to recover some of the criminal funds.

Kommersant newspaper reported that more than a third of the bitcoin in the "Pension" file had been retrieved by the authorities. It was not clear what had happened to the rest.

Kristina Lyakhovenko, a lower-ranked colleague of Tambiyev, was jailed for nine years as part of the same case. Lawyers for both the defendants said they would appeal.

Russia is currently pursuing a spate of high-profile bribery investigations, many involving senior figures in the military.

(Reporting by Mark Trevelyan; Editing by Gareth Jones)

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