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Comment by bobuk | Hacker News Reader

Yandex is a public company with stocks on NASDAQ. Can you ever imagine how it is hard to hide bribes inside of public company budget? :)

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Just give someone a big performance bonus with the understanding that part of it is to be used on bribes? Seems rather easy.

Nope, both salaries and bonuses (even on C level) is too low in Russia to hide any amount of bribe in them. Anyway, I never heard about bribes for electricity for last 5 years in Russia.

> salaries and bonuses (even on C level) is too low in Russia to hide any amount of bribe in them

Let's say someone claims that their programmer genius Ivan saved a company ~1m USD/year with latest commit; and awards him $100k. And you see this unusual bonus, how are you going to know 99% of that doesn't go to someone other than Ivan?

Typical Ivan with good developer skills costs $30k/year in Moscow. But you are right, theoretically it is possible to hide some money if you really wants to. As far as I know there's no big non-gov companies who spend something on bribes right now. May be it's because I too believe in humankind.

I think you're an advanced version of a putinbot :).

He's an employee of Yandex, well-known in the Russian dev community.

Well-known? Thanks :)

Not very. International listings don't need to abide by normal US listing regulations for financial reporting.

Two words: "consultancy services"

You can check it on sec.gov. Yandex spend nothing on consultancy for 2014 and 2015 years

I can't be bothered to dig right now, but you're saying that a company with 5000+ employees did not use any consultants at all, zero, for 2014 and 2015? I really can't believe that.

Edit: there are many ways to hide bribes, of course. Typically it involves overpaying for something. It would be hard for even a non-corrupt tax authority to tell the difference between having bad negotiation skills and bribes.

My point is "big non-government companies in Russia doesn't pay any bribes". But you're right, it's definitely possible do hide some amount of bribe money if you really want to.

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