Medvedev guards splash out on £6,500 bathtub
Federal Protective Service requests a German Burg Crono 2.0 tub costing more than Russian average annual wage
A Burg Crono 2.0 mineral-cast bathtub. Photograph: burgbad.com
It's sweaty work being a bodyguard to Dmitry Medvedev – or so it seems after members of the president's security detail ordered a £6,500 luxury bathtub.
In Russia's latest scandal over free-spending bureaucrats, the Federal Protective Service (FSO) asked for a German Burg Crono 2.0 mineral-cast tub costing more than the country's average annual wage.
The request could embarrass Medvedev, who has tried to forge an image as a crusader against corruption.
Under Russian law, all government procurement orders must be published online. Medvedev tightened the system this year, but there have been a series of outrages over officials' excessive tastes.
This month clerks in Irkutsk ordered 25 fur hats at a cost of 500,000 roubles (£10,000). A spokesman said the "classic chocolate-brown sable ushankas for men" were intended for a "gift fund" rather than to warm the ears of chilly bigwigs in the Siberian town.
Things were no better in the impoverished southern republic of Dagestan, where the finance minister, Abdusamad Gamidov, hastily retreated from an order for a £180,000 Audi saloon in February. He had second thoughts after the anti-graft campaigner Alexei Navalny published a blogpost on the subject. "I'm sure that most world presidents get around in more modest automobiles," Navalny said.
In 2009 the federal interior ministry offered to pay up to £87,000 for a hand-carved cherrywood bed with a headboard covered in 24-carat gold. The purchase caused an outcry but did not deter the finance ministry from ordering £50,000 of gilded furniture last summer. (It later said it would spend only half that amount.)
Many of the prices named on the zakupki.gov.ru website are thought to be inflated to allow for kickbacks. Medvedev said in October that Russia lost £20bn in bribes every year.
A spokesman for the FSO denied the 336,000-rouble bathtub was overpriced, telling a Russian newspaper it was "not some kind of short, sit-up job, like people buy for khrushchevki [Soviet-era apartment blocks]."
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