Идеология квалификации (аккредитации) инвесторов на фондовом рынке

Abstract

Accreditation of investors is an unusual institution of civil and administrative law, since in fact one counterparty under a civil contract must make a quasi-administrative decision on the admission of another counterparty to civil transactions with itself and third parties, albeit based on the criteria provided by law. We discuss the first results of the investor accreditation reform that took place in Russia in 2020–2021. We have also summarised approaches to investor accreditation that have been developed in a number of foreign jurisdictions, with special attention paid to current Russian and American regulatory approaches and debates on these issues. We propose, taking into account a reasonable transition period, to completely switch to the qualification of investors only on the basis of an assessment of their real knowledge based on tests and professional certificates, as well as on paid personal income tax from stock transactions, abandoning all other qualification criteria. This will require, among other things, complete re-accreditation of all Russian retail investors. Testing should be carried out by organisations independent from brokers.