Russian Politician Found Encased in Concrete

The body of a missing Moscow city legislator has been found in a private garage basement on the out skirts of the city. The missing man Mikhail Pakhomov, 36, who was also a construction tycoon, was found inside a rusted metal barrel filled with concrete, according to police.
For many people this is something normally seen in the movies or TV cop shows however it is fairly common in Russia especially in the early 1990’s. On Sunday evening investigators removed the body and police stated that Pakhomov had been tortured. It is believed that he was killed over a $80 million loan.
It is no secret that many sectors of Russian politics is deeply corrupted, last year Mr. Putin’s chief of staff, Sergei B. Ivanov, called housing and utilities services one of Russia’s most corrupt sectors. There are large sums of money at stake and most of the lucrative contracts are doled out at a municipal level meaning it is pretty easy for corruption.
Mr. Pakhomov was a promising young star in United Russia, which rules Russia and was founded by President Vladimir V. Putin. He was head of a construction company and it has been reported that he had won large contracts to develop utilities and infrastructure in several cities.
There haven’t been many people to survive when they try to fight the corruption in Russia, in 2011 the mayor of Sergiyev Posad was gunned down in his driveway. It was a contract killing which investigators believed was most likely linked to his disputes with the city’s utility contractors.
An editorial by Gorod48, a news Web site in Lipetsk said: “A similar event has never happened with a V.I.P. in our city. Even in the ‘evil ’90s’ nobody disappeared: businessmen were killed right where they lived or worked, and bandits from competing groups shot or blew each other up wherever they happened to be.”