Choke On These Spoons, Guys

Racketeers on salaries and benefits.

A defendant in the "orthopaedics case" recently gave an interview to Mediazona, in which he described how the KGB extorted money from arrested doctors. He said that the KGB officers randomly charged each of them the amount of the damage they had allegedly caused and then set a condition: if you pay ten times the amount, you will be released and the sentence will be suspended, or it will be a fine. All the doctors agreed and paid.

The damage seems to have been invented by the investigators. The ex-defendant says that there was no logic in determining the amount - they said $500 for some and $5,000 for others. As a result, changing the preventive measure cost the Belarusian orthopaedists between 5 and 50 thousand dollars. They had to transfer the money to the KGB's account and provide a receipt.

Everyone remembers the "case of the orthopaedists". The Belarusian Investigative Centre published its investigation in 2022, in which it proved that the beneficiary of this scandalous case was a private clinic Merci, owned by friends of Viktar Lukashenka: now imported endoprostheses are only installed there. State hospitals can only offer domestic prostheses, and even then you have to wait five years. In general, it is clear: Lukashenka's family wins, doctors and patients lose. But that's not what I'm talking about.

If friends like the owners of the Mercy Clinic (I have no doubt that there are many such companies in Belarus - those who, in exchange for generous and regular payment, have the opportunity to make money from certain exclusive contracts) "give" money for the luxurious life of Lukashenka's family, who will provide a less luxurious, but also excessively luxurious life for the law enforcers? Lukashenka will not give money for this: he needs to maintain his planes, yachts and palaces. And the budget is already tight. Over the past three years, the law enforcers have got used to living better than ever before. Lukashenka has bought their loyalty. But now the state coffers are a little empty - sanctions, war, the withdrawal of companies, the brain drain, the relocation of large companies. But since the regime relies mainly on bayonets, Lukashenka can't tell all those Tersels "there's no money, but hang on". But he can give them full freedom to extort: go ahead, boys, arrest whoever you want and charge them as much as you can get; no one limits your methods of extortion. So "earn" as much as you can. Remember: right after the wave of arrests, KGB spokesman Bychek said on television that 35 doctors and five representatives of commercial structures had been arrested. And if the doctors' freedom was estimated at a maximum of $50,000, I suspect that the businessmen faced quite a different bill.

So the KGB certainly made a million or two on the "orthopaedic case". But imagine what kind of money we are talking about when they arrest non-doctors? There is no need for budget financing - they can manage on their own.

Besides, the financing of the social structure has practically been shifted to private individuals. Just recall the numerous arrests for collecting donations, summonses to the KGB and DFR, and tempting offers to remain free in exchange for transferring the amount of the donation multiplied by ten to an orphanage or hospital. Last November, in an interview with Sovbelia, Andrei Shcheglov, chief investigator of the Minsk Criminal Investigation Department, proudly told of a sales manager, Yegor Chireichik, who had transferred $100 to 'an extremist organisation'. But during the investigation, Shcheglov says, Yegor was not an extremist, but simply made a mistake and repented. And the state decided to meet his needs and allow him to return home to his wife and minor child.

At this point I was really surprised: do law enforcers sometimes feel like human beings? But then I read: Yegor had to transfer 30,000 rubles to the account of "an organisation that takes care of 280 orphans". In other words, a young man with a minor child and a wife on maternity leave spent not ten times but a hundred times the amount for a transfer of 100 dollars. To a dubious organisation whose name investigator Shcheglov was ashamed to say aloud.

I suspect we are talking about children who have been forcibly removed from Ukraine. All the more so because the investigator then tells of an IT specialist from Kazakhstan working in Belarus who, in 2020, transferred money (to extremists, of course, to whom else) and was arrested. In order to be released, the IT specialist transferred more than a million roubles to the account of the Russian Children's Oncology Centre. I think it is quite obvious why the RPNT can be called openly, while the mysterious "organisation that took the trouble to raise 280 orphans" cannot.

In general, the system works perfectly: businessmen and defendants in scandalous cases take the law into their custody in exchange for release from prison, and peaceful donors now subsidise hospitals, orphanages and even dubious "organisations" whose welfare the law is concerned with. Of course, if there is a chance to get out of prison, one person will sell everything: kidneys, flats, homeland and silver spoons. And another person will not even be offered a deal and will be killed in prison, like Vadim Khrasko last week.

May you choke on these silver spoons, you inhumans.

Iryna Khalip, especially for Charter97.org

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