I'd find this very surprising, if true. When I worked for a company that was essentially developing malware, we were able to get ourselves whitelisted by most anti-virus software (either by going through an automated submission process, or outright bribery). The only one who wouldn't budge on principal, no matter what we offered, was Kaspersky. All the others either auto-whitelisted us when we asked or after we paid them. I gained a lot of respect for Kaspersky for that (and lost a lot of respect for the majority of their competitors).
If that happened, it had nothing to do with bribery and corruption, but incompetence.
Kaspersky's refusal isn't a sign of their integrity, but avoidance of an obvious trap. I'm not saying they don't have integrity, but even if they didn't, it would be very dumb to take that bribe, especially in a country very familiar with corporate blackmail.
Their products haven't been system hogs for a long time now. I used Norton AV on a fairly reedy dual core Celeron (1.8 GHz)with a platter drive and it only slowed that thing down when it was running a scheduled scan.
