Kirov Ballet Leaders Free After Arrest : Dance: Russian prosecutors say police evidence in bribery probe was insufficient to bring formal charges against the two men.

A major Russian bribery scandal took an unexpected turn Tuesday after prosecutors declined to support police accusations that the Kirov Ballet’s director and chief choreographer took millions of dollars from a Canadian impresario for the right to organize the dance company’s foreign tours.

Oleg Vinogradov, the ballet company’s choreographer for the past 18 years, was freed from jail Tuesday, a day after the release of his boss, Anatoly Malkov. Each man had been in custody three days, the maximum allowed without formal charges.

Malkov was arrested in his office Friday while reportedly accepting $10,000 in marked bills from the Canadian, who had cooperated with a police investigation and has not been identified. Police seized another $150,000 in cash from Malkov’s office and $197,000 from Vinogradov when they arrested him the next day.

The unproven case of bribery at the Kirov, one of the world’s best-known ballet companies, is one of the most blatant in post-Soviet Russia, where economic upheaval and a weak legal system make the practice rampant.

Police investigators said the company’s leaders made bribe-taking an everyday practice in dealings with foreign partners. They usually asked for money in addition to the contract price to organize a tour, then would extort more by threatening to cancel the performances, authorities said.

Russia’s Interfax news agency quoted a senior official as saying Vinogradov is the key suspect in the case. The official said the Canadian had transferred $3 million to the choreographer’s account in a Swiss bank since he began arranging tours for the company in 1991.

“According to our information, the amount of bribes totaled millions of dollars,” said Nikolai Danilov, head of the economic crimes section of the St. Petersburg police.

But Monday, the St. Petersburg prosecutor’s office said police evidence was insufficient to bring formal charges against the two men. “The money confiscated from them might have been given as bonuses,” said Tatiana Moskalenko, the deputy prosecutor. “The investigators still must prove it was bribes.”

The case also appeared to have been weakened by the absence of the Canadian, who apparently has left Russia.

Malkov told reporters Tuesday that the charges are “a total lie, nonobjective and not proved by anyone.”

The investigation is continuing, along with a government audit of the 212-year-old theater.

But legal experts said it could go nowhere.

“The hardest thing to prove in a bribery case is to ascertain that the money, alleged as a bribe, was meant by a suspect to be spent for his own personal needs,” said Arkady Kramarev, a former St. Petersburg police chief. “A suspect can always say the money was given to him by gentleman’s agreement and that he planned to hand it over to an orphanage.”

Malkov, a 58-year-old former Communist Party official, was appointed director of the Kirov last year by Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin. Besides having foreign bank accounts, police said Malkov and Vinogradov have villas, yachts and other expensive property in Russia and abroad.

The Kirov, founded in 1783 in the reign of Catherine the Great, is now called the Maryinsky Opera and Ballet. It has kept its Soviet-era name for foreign tours. However, even these have seen troubles in recent months: A planned fall tour of the United States, including a stop scheduled for this week at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, was abruptly canceled in August due to financial difficulties. The theater has showcased many renowned performers, including opera singer Fyodor Shalyapin and prima ballerina Anna Pavlova. During the Cold War, many of its dancers, including Rudolf Nureyev and Mikhail Baryshnikov, defected to the West.