Misuse of Public Funds

B) Discuss the content of the article.

A) Open the brackets putting the verbs in the correct form.

It is a universally accepted truth in Russia that the heads of many public funds habitually (to divert) trillions of rubles away from the stated purpose into lucrative deals for personal gain.

Over the first 10 month of this year, the Accounts Chamber, a watchdog of the State Duma, (to reveal) that nearly 1.8 trillion rubles, were not used for their designated purposes.

The auditors (to find) that nearly every fund was not using its money as it was supposed to. For instance, the Moscow branch of Russia’s Pension Fund (to buy) a building for about 2 billion rubles, (to spend) 11.5 billion rubles on its renovation and repair, and (to pay) another 6 billion rubles to an intermediary for “selecting the building preparing the necessary documents, and obtaining the consent of the parties concerned.” The Pension Fund (to misuse) more than 660 billion rubles despite the fact that people in some regions were left without pension payments for up to three months.

Many public funds (to set) up their own banks with charter capital running into hundreds of billions of rubles.

In spite of the obvious violations of regulations, all these operations cannot be put down as embezzlement without court rulings, and the violators are unlikely to be sued.

Misappropriations from extrabudgetary funds (to encourage) not only by people with a particular mentality and by a lack of adequate actions on the part of law-enforcement agencies, but also by the very system through which financial resources (to flow) from top to bottom. State extrabudgetary funds (to act) as an intermediary that collects payments and remits them to the recipients. Thus, they (to tempt) to “invest” the money in lucrative fast-yielding deals.

There would probably have been fewer cases of embezzlement and misuse of assets if public funds had initially been granted legal rights to earn money by, for example, transacting in securities and foreign-exchange valuables, and making short-term deposits in banks. So far the funds only (to have) a list of operations barred to them.

Words you may need:

misuse – зловживання

universally accepted – загальноприйнятий

habitually – звичайно

divert – відволікати, відводити

lucrative – прибутковий, вигідний

personal gain – особиста вигода

Accounts Chamber – Рахункова палата

designated purposes – вказані (заплановані) цілі

consent – згода

violation – порушення

embezzlement – розтрата

court ruling – постанова суду

sue – шукати в суді, переслідувати в судовому порядку

misappropriation – незаконне присвоєння, розтрата

remit – переводити (засоби)

recipient – одержувач

fast-yielding deals – угоди, що швидко приносять прибуток

valuables – цінності

bar – забороняти

Дата добавления: 2014-11-29