Senior government and law enforcement officials detained in Kemerovo

Two vice governors and three leading regional law enforcement officials were among seven detained in a 1 billion roubles bribery probe this week. They are suspected of extortion involving 51% of the shares of mining company Razrez Inskoy.

Kemerovo governor Tuleev claimed his detained deputies Alexey Ivanov and Alexander Danilchenko were 'framed'. He also attacked the detention of senior regional official Elena Troitskaya.

They were acting under his orders in seeking to resolve problems at the company including failure to pay salaries, he said.

'The charges against Danilchenko, Ivanov and Troitskaya I consider to be absurd,' he said. 'They are not the main goal. Most likely, they need a governor. I have felt it for two years already, there is a strong fight.' 

The governor says his deputies were 'very cleverly framed'. Danilchenko and Ivanov were sent to the mine and he admits one of them may have been legally 'illiterate'.

'I told them to pass all the materials on the whole situation to the law enforcement agencies in person. All they did was to decide the question of the prevention of strikes, to make the mine work.'

Investigative Committee spokeswoman Svetlana Petrenko said: 'There is hard work ongoing, and we are not talking about the ultimate guilt of the defendants, so we are puzzled with the loud statements about the alleged absurdity of the accusations, especially from those who are completely unfamiliar with the case materials.' 

Alexander Danilchenko told Novosibirsk media Novosty.Zdes from his court cage: 'There is no logic in this detention. What have we done? The enterprise works normally, the owner is still the same. Whyare we to blame?

'We are to blame that we did not stand aside when the people did not get their salary for four months. The situation was that the miners did not get their salaries.

'They went on strike, refused to go down the mine and work. I came there, I was talking to the miners, persuading them to work. There was a technical issue, if the mine would stop, it could collapse. So I persuaded the people to continue the work.' 

Others detained were the head of the Investigative Committee in Kemerovo region Sergey Kalinin, deputy head of the department for investigation of particularly important cases of the regional Investigative Committee Sergey Kryukov, senior investigator Artem Shevelev, and the founder the company 'PTK Ugol' Alexander Shchukin.