Alexey Navalni's Website Exposes Corporate Corruption in Russia

"My main principle is to publish only the information I can verify. If an anonymous source were to send me secret military documents I most likely wouldn’t publish them because I have no way to check them, and they could very well be a set up. 95% of the time, however, the information we 'uncover' is actually not classified. You can find very interesting details by analysing open information sources.---The Observers/France 24 (12-3-10)

In Russia, people are reading Navalny.ru, a website hosted by Alexey Navalny, a young Russian lawyer who exposes corruption in state-affiliated companies such as Gazprom. Mr. Navalny also has videos on YouTube.

The Observers/France 24 (12-3-10) writes:

In Russia, the findings of a young whistleblower lawyer concerning the rampant corruption of major state-affiliated companies have made much bigger waves than the recent tsunami of Wikileaks revelations.

34-year-old Moscow lawyer Alexey Navalny could be nicknamed the “one-man Wikileaks”. His website [Navalny.ru] is dedicated to uncovering and publishing incidents of high-level corporate corruption, with revelations concerning Russian natural gas monopoly Gazprom, leading Russian oil company Rosneft and Russian bank VTP, among others.

Navalny’s latest findings concern Russian pipeline-construction giant Transneft. The website published what he describes as internal Transneft documents proving that company directors embezzled four billion dollars [2.9 billion euros] of public funds intended for the building of a massive pipeline from Siberia to the Pacific Ocean, using fake subcontractor companies to transfer the money onto offshore accounts.

Navalny says that Russian authorities were fully aware of the corruption, but failed to bring top Transneft managers to justice. Asked about the findings, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said he could se “no necessity to comment on this blog". On November 17, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin publicly thanked the company for its completion of the pipeline.

The documents (in Russian) can be downloaded from Navalny’s Web site or here. [See the full text of this informative article and see what you think of Navalny's site.]