Police arrest one of two suspects in multi-billion crown corruption case

Police have arrested one of two men suspected of illegal involvement in the distribution of several billion crowns in EU funding. The men in question are head workers of the office of the Southwest Regional Council. Anticorruption police believe the two men influenced the selection of projects that were to benefit from several billion crowns in EU funding. At the behest of the police, the Ministry of Finance halted a nearly completed tender process for a series of public developmental projects in the Southwest region amounting to 3.8 billion crowns. A police raid of the office carried out at the end of last year did not result in any arrests. The charges of attempting to influence a public tender and damage the interests of the European Community carry sentences of up to 12 years imprisonment.