Armed police raided IBM's offices in Moscow yesterday as part of a corruption investigation into Russia's state Pension Fund.

Masked police carrying automatic weapons raided 10 addresses and seized documents. The raids took most of the day and included other computer companies, resellers, and the homes of some pension officials.

An anonymous police source told Interfax: "Investigators are looking into a theory suggesting that computers were purchased at one price and sold to the Pension Fund at a different price."

A briefing note on IBM's website describes the deal with the pension fund as "the largest European mid-range server deployment supports the Pension Fund of the Russian Federation serving 120m clients through 2, 500 regional offices".

According to Kommersant, IBM sold the Pension Fund 1,000 servers and some 50,000 PCs.

Police suspect the fund was deliberately overcharged for computers. ®