The draft law on responsibility for establishing legal entities with criminal purposes requires improvement
The State Duma adopted in the first reading a draft law, which fixes criminal responsibility for creating a commercial organization with the purpose of committing a crime.
Igor Pastukhov, Advocate at the Firm, notes that the draft law may cause a number of difficulties if approved as presented today. The advocate explains that the wording “…crimes connected with financial operations…” repeats the provisions of articles 174 and 174.1 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (CCRF) almost fully, and in this connection the law enforcers are likely to regard the draft article of the CCRF as related exclusively to the participation in legalization of results of criminal activity. On the other hand, the use of the word “connected with” might cause doubts: logically, another notion must be here, which is different to the notion it is connected with.
The advocate Igor Pastukhov believes that, in order to curtail the widely used practice of registration of legal entities with the use of documents of figureheads, it would be useful to introduce criminal liability for actions set out in parts two and three of the draft article, no matter the purposes of the culprits. These are in any case caused by the wish to violate some provisions of the Russian legislation, to by-pass some limitations imposed by law. Also, it would be possible to construct qualified structures with a more strict liability, when there is a purpose to commit or to facilitate committing of a crime.
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