MOSCOW, April 18 (RAPSI) - A search is underway on Thursday at the Moscow office of the Skolkovo Foundation. The Investigative Committee has confirmed that the investigation is in progress but did not specify upon what allegations.

The Skolkovo representative told RIA Novosti that police and Federal Security Service (FSB) officers came in the morning, gathered the foundation’s staff in a conference room and asked everyone to turn over their cell phones. By early afternoon, investigators were talking to the foundation’s president, billionaire businessman Viktor Vekselberg.

Earlier, a criminal case was opened against Kirill Lugovtsev, the head of the Financial Department at the Skolkovo Foundation, Vladimir Khokhlov, the head of TFK Skolkovo, a subsidiary of the Skolkovo Foundation, and several other individuals.

Two high-ranking Skolkovo officials are suspected of embezzling 24 million rubles (about $800,000).

In addition, the Investigative Committee began verifying evidence collected by the Federal Security Service indicating that 3.5 billion roubles (about $105 billion) allocated for Skolkovo from the federal budget to open an eponymous center had been stored on Metcombank accounts.

The Skolkovo Foundation is a non-profit organization initiated by the president in September 2010. The foundation aims at recruiting resources from across Russia for conducting modern applied research and creating a comfortable environment for scientific development in five priority areas of technological progress, including energy and energy-saving, space exploration, biomedicine, nuclear technology and IT.