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Italian woman guilty of adoption bribery

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AP in Moscow

An Italian woman was given a seven-year suspended jail sentence by a Russian court yesterday after being convicted of bribing officials and forging documents to ease the adoption of Russian children by Italian families.


Nadezhda Fratti

, of the Italian adoption agency

Arcobaleno

, was arrested last year in the southern Russian city of Volgograd.

A Volgograd court acquitted her in April, citing insufficient evidence, but the supreme court overturned that decision and returned the case to the original court.

The court ruled yesterday that Fratti had to report regularly to police in her town of Volzhsk for the next five years, according to a report from the Interfax news agency.

The director of a Volgograd orphanage, an education department inspector and an orphanage doctor accused of collaborating with Fratti received suspended sentences between three and seven years.

Fratti helped Italian families adopt about 600 children between 1993 and 2000, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported, citing the prosecution.

State prosecutor Alexander Melikhov claimed that investigators were looking into allegations that some of the children had ended up in an Italian organ transplant clinic, Interfax reported.

Adoption is a sensitive issue in Russia, where more than 200,000 children live in institutions. Russian families rarely adopt because of the social stigma, yet Russian nationalists have often accused foreigners of "buying" Russian children, and cases of abuse by foreign adoptive parents have been widely reported in the Russian media.

Russia imposed new registration requirements on adoption agencies in 2000 with the aim of rooting out corruption.

2002 Dec 31