Letters warned Kremlin of 'corrupt Vladimir Putin'

The Kremlin was warned 20 years ago not to appoint Vladimir Putin to "any other positions" until a corruption scandal during his time as a local government officer in St Petersburg had been resolved, according to a cache of documents released on the internet.

Hundreds of scanned letters and other papers were published on Facebook on Tuesday by friends of Marina Salye, a former member of St Petersburg city council who launched an inquiry into Mr Putin's office in the early 1990s, and who died earlier this month at the age of 77.

Miss Salye's documents suggest that Mr Putin, then head of St Petersburg's committee for foreign relations, issued permits to Russian companies to barter raw materials abroad in exchange for meat, fruit, sugar and other produce, because the city was facing severe food shortages. However, although shipments of up to pounds 63?million in timber, oil and other commodities were sent abroad, no food was ever delivered to the port.

Despite the efforts of Miss Salye, who took charge of a commission investigating the missing food deliveries, no action was taken over the affair. Mr Putin, 59, has always denied any wrongdoing.

The archive published online includes a 1992 letter from Russia's chief state inspector warning that Mr Putin could be removed from his post as a local official in St Petersburg because of the alleged corruption. It instructed the federal government not to appoint Mr Putin - who has since served two presidential terms, and is currently Russia's prime minister and president-elect - "to any other positions" until the inspector had examined the case.

Mr Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said on Wednesday: "The assertions made in these papers are pretty old, and have been shown more than once to be untrue."