Drugs, bribes: $49 billion left Russia illegally in '12

Grigory Dukor / Reuters

Russia's Central Bank Governor Sergei Ignatyev has generally kept a low profile during his 11-year tenure.

By Douglas Busvine and Katya Golubkova, Reuters

MOSCOW - Nearly $50 billion was transferred out of Russia illegally in 2012 and more than half this sum may have been controlled by a single group of people, the country's central bank said on Wednesday.

Sergei Ignatyev, chairman of the Bank of Russia, was citing the findings of a study that the bank said it would publish later on Wednesday.

"You get the impression that they (half the transfers) are all controlled by one well-organized group of people," Sergei Ignatyev, chairman of the Bank of Russia, told the Vedomosti daily in an interview.

Ignatyev, who is due to retire in June, declined to identify the group in response to a reporter's question at the Federation Council, the upper house of parliament, where he was due to deliver an address.

But the central bank analysis appears to be an indictment of President Vladimir Putin's brand of state capitalism, which critics say has allowed official corruption to flourish on a huge scale.

'Bribes and kickbacks'It also marks an unusually strong intervention by Ignatyev, who during his 11-year tenure has kept a generally low profile, seeking to preserve the central bank's policy autonomy without pushing for full, Western-style independence from politics.

Putin is due to nominate a successor to him in March, but no front runner has yet emerged.

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Drugs, bribes: $49 billion left Russia illegally in '12