Illicit Enrichment: a New Approach to Criminalizing the Act

Abstract

The authors analyze the necessity and expediency of incorporating the norm on liability for illicit enrichment into Russian criminal legislation in accordance with the requirements of Art. 20 of the United Nations Convention against Corruption of 2003. The ratification of this international legal document placed Russian lawmakers under an obligation to modernize the anti-corruption legislation, including an obligation to recognize the illegal character of the actions of those officials whose assets have increased disproportionally to their legal income. The authors recognize the existence of different approaches to estimating illicit enrichment as corpus delicti. They rebut the allegation that establishing criminal liability for illicit enrichment does not correspond to the principles of criminal and criminal procedure law; they draw parallels with the current corpora delicti (illegal entrepreneurship and others) in criminal law and prove that establishing that a person possesses certain assets does not contradict the principle of guilt and the principle of the presumption of innocence. The criminal law analysis of illicit enrichment was carried out using the method of modeling corpus delicti with the use of constructions suggested by other scholars and the authors of the draft law on changes in the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation regarding this corpus delicti. The criticism of the suggested models and the research of some elements of corpus delicti, specifically, the objective side of illicit enrichment, led the authors to the conclusion that it is impossible to include this corpus delicti into law because it does not correspond to the requirements of the constitutional and criminal law principle of justice. The impossibility of criminalizing illicit enrichment does not contradict the recommendatory character of conventional norms and does not result in a gap in law. The problem is solved on the basis of legislation on public service, civil and civil procedure legislation. The examined court practice regarding the cases in which the prosecutors requested to turn into a state income the assets whose licit acquisition has not been proven makes it possible to claim that international anti-corruption standards connected with illicit enrichment have been put into practice.