An institutional corruption scheme has been uncovered within the Agency for Plant Protection and Quarantine, where participants allegedly established an unofficial "tariff sheet" for processing import documentation. The crackdown was announced by the Department for Combating Economic Crimes under the General Prosecutor's Office.
According to the department, investigators established that the scheme was orchestrated by officials within the agency itself. These employees allegedly set fixed bribe rates for permits that business owners are legally required to file when importing goods into the country.
As part of a targeted sting operation to protect entrepreneurial rights, a woman identified as G.U. was caught red-handed while accepting a $1,000 bribe. According to the task force, she received the cash in exchange for leveraging her connections inside the agency to fast-track a Turkish firm, Y.T., into the official registry of foreign exporters.
The investigation further revealed that G.U. had colluded with a chief specialist at the agency, M.G. Together, they fraudulently extracted 2.9 million Uzbek sum from a local company, S.S. LLC, promising to secure import quarantine permits for timber shipments from Russia and tomatoes from Turkmenistan.
Furthermore, a total of 10.9 billion Uzbek sum was funneled from various individuals into two personal bank cards belonging to G.U. via peer-to-peer (P2P) transfers. According to the Department, only 1.6 billion sum of this amount went toward official payments. Meanwhile, 6.1 billion sum was withdrawn in cash and handed over to complicit agency officials, and the remaining 3.1 billion sum was spent by G.U. on personal expenses.
An audit also scrutinized 91.7 billion sum deposited into the treasury accounts of the agency and its subsidiary organizations. Investigators discovered that 14.9 billion sum of these transactions had been processed through the personal bank cards of 759 ordinary citizens. Remarkably, 174 of these individuals turned out to be employees within the agency’s own network, and another 34 were their close relatives.
Criminal cases have been opened regarding these findings under Article 168 (Fraud) and Article 211 (Bribery) of the Criminal Code of Uzbekistan. Investigative actions are ongoing.
Previously, the Department under the General Prosecutor's Office uncovered another massive corruption scheme involving the illegal placement of Uzbek nationals into jobs in South Korea.
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