Criminal offenses against finances under the draft of the new Criminal Code of Ukraine

Abstract

The article is devoted to the analysis of the provisions of the project of the new Criminal Code of Ukraine, devoted to imposing liability for criminal offenses against finances. It has been established that, despite the generally innovative and progressive nature of these provisions, some of them are debatable. The conclusions of the article include suggestions aimed at their improvement.
 In particular, it has been proven that the circumstances proposed in the project, which increase the severity of financial crimes, are partly such that they contradict requirements for the content of qualifying features developed in the criminal law doctrine as a means of differentiating criminal liability.
 Both “separate” description of such crimes as counterfeiting money and dealing with counterfeit money, as well as classification of these offenses as crimes of the 5th degree of severity, have been criticized.
 It was established that one of the serious (systemic) shortcomings of the project is the numerous inconsistencies between the degrees of severity of specific criminal offenses defined in its Special Part and the types of damage established in the General Part.
 It is shown that the current version of the stimulating provision, designed for tax evasion and non-payment due to carelessness of a tax, fee or single contribution to mandatory state social insurance: a) is able to unreasonably expand the subject composition of these crimes at the expense of persons who voluntarily participate in the system of mandatory state social insurance; b) does not take into account the fact that the subject of tax crimes and the organization which is legally the payer of tax and social contributions do not coincide.
 The expediency of a clearer delineation of such crimes as credit fraud and theft, as well as specifying the actions that will constitute the crime of “abuse of the financial interests of the European Union”, is indicated.
 The debatable clauses inherent in the definition of a predicate act are defined. The impropriety of singling out such form of the objective side of legalization (laundering) of assets (income) obtained through criminal means, as providing assistance to a person involved in legalization (laundering) to avoid liability for what he did, has been proven.
 Key words: criminal offenses against finance, money counterfeiting, payment means and instruments, credit fraud, tax evasion, money laundering, legalization, assets obtained through crime, predicate act, differentiation of criminal liability.