Russia investigates financial crisis reporting- report

MOSCOW, (AFP) - Prosecutors are launching inquiries across Russia against media reporting on the financial crisis in a bid to stem growing concern about its impact, the Kommersant newspaper reported on Wednesday.

"It's not censorship. We're just checking how reliable the information is," a press official from the prosecutor general's office was quoted as saying.

The official gave the example of unreliable reports about a bankruptcy causing a run on deposits from a bank in the Far Eastern port of Vladivostok.

Regional prosecutors have been ordered to check local media "in connection with measures taken by the Russian government to improve the situation in the financial sector and other sectors of the economy," Kommersant said.

Investigators in Sverdlovsk, a key industrial region in the Ural mountains, are checking local media for attempts "to destabilise the situation in the region," a spokeswoman for the local prosecutor's office was quoted as saying.

"If we establish that the law has been violated, there could be disciplinary measures against the guilty, including criminal punishment," she said.

As the crisis has worsened in Russia, officials have voiced growing concern about the reaction among a public still mindful of the economic chaos and social upheaval that followed the 1998 financial crisis.

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev this month told law enforcement to monitor attempts at "destabilising the social situation" during the crisis, saying: "We have a stable state... We don't need a return to the 1990s."