MOSCOW, March 26 (RAPSI) – Prosecutor General Yury Chaika has asked the government to audit all military, special and dual-purpose research projects for the past three years after the misappropriation of 1 billion rubles ($17.4 million) was exposed in public funds, Izvestia newspaper writes on Thursday.

Izvestia writes that the inspections conducted by the Prosecutor General’s Office and the Federal Service for Intellectual Property, Patents and Trademarks (Rospatent) revealed violations in the use of a considerable part of budget funds allocated for dual-purpose research and development projects in 2011-2014.

Over 200 state contracts worth approximately 95 billion rubles ($1.7 billion) have been signed in the past few years, but the 450 patents registered within the framework of these contracts have not been implemented according to the newspaper.

“It has been reliably established that direct damage worth about 1 billion rubles (17.4 million) has been done to the state in the framework of military, special and dual-purpose R&D contracts signed with the Ministry of Industry and Trade,” Izvestia writes.

A source with close ties in the prosecutor’s office told the newspaper that Yury Chaika writes in his letter that the situation greatly deteriorated after the power to protect intellectual property was removed from the Federal Agency for Legal Protection of Military, Special and Dual-Purpose Intellectual Activity Results (Russian abbreviation FAPRID) in 2012.