The agency, which puts forward one strange idea after another, is now ready to imprison businessmen for legalizing insignificant amounts

In dealing with the deterioration of the investment climate in the country, Rosfinmonitoring is showing amazing persistence, dedication and productivity. A little over a week ago, the department came up with a whole range of different ideas, each more harmful than the other. And here is a new bunch of initiatives.

I have already listed the biggest innovations from financial controllers: oblige banks to close accounts of suspicious clients, prohibit companies from reducing pre-tax profits for the costs of purchasing securities of offshore issuers. Tax inspectors want to allow tax officials to re-qualify transactions without a trial and charge additional taxes, oblige banks to suspend transactions on the accounts of companies that are not present at the address recorded in the constituent documents, and increase the authorized capital of LLCs, JSCs and CJSCs by 50-500 times. At the same time, Rosfinmonitoring issued an order turning banks into total controllers of the accounts of non-profit organizations, ostensibly for the purpose of anti-terrorism prevention.

But what is being proposed now spoils the business climate even more than previous initiatives. Rosfinmonitoring proposes to reduce the threshold for classifying laundering crimes as “committed on a large scale” by an order of magnitude - from 6 million rubles to 600,000. The threshold matters: now the punishment for money laundering is a fine of 120,000 rubles , laundering on a large scale is a fine of up to 300,000 rubles and imprisonment of up to 4 years. The amendments prepared by Rosfinmonitoring lower the threshold for the “size” of a crime by an order of magnitude and introduce sanctions for this - a fine of up to 200,000 and imprisonment of up to two years. And the previous limit, at 6 million, will become the threshold for “especially large” crimes, with the same penalties.

In fact, all thresholds fixed in absolute values are usually raised, not lowered. Inflation does not stand still. The threshold of 6 million rubles was introduced two years ago, and during this time prices clearly did not fall 10 times.

Laundering, or legalization, is a very strange, dubious and ambiguous criminal innovation. Its original meaning is clear: let's say you are an honest burgher, a resident of the Cote d'Azur or the Spanish province of Alicante. And so either Colombian drug lords or Tambov bandits come to you with a lot of money, and everyone strives to be neighbors (in 2011, Russians bought about 5,000 real estate properties in Spain for €1.2 billion - €240,000 per property). There is no way to punish these people for crimes committed somewhere overseas, and I only want to have respectable citizens as neighbors. This is where the concept of legalization (laundering) comes in: “Do you want to buy? Prove the origin of the funds."

When the concept of laundering is used for such preventive control, this does not raise any special issues. It’s another matter when laundering becomes an independent criminal offense. After all, by spending money, even obtained unjustly, a person does not commit a crime. The offense was committed once and somewhere - there and then, where he obtained these funds. And here the possibility of double punishment arises for what is essentially one crime: first you are punished for stealing, and then for spending the stolen property. Well, yes, I spent it, but what else can I do with it?

This feature of laundering is used to the fullest by the Russian law enforcement system in order to grab businessmen by the breasts. Laundering becomes an ideal second criminal offense that can be attached to any economic crime. Just automatically - the money doesn’t stick to your hands, but is transferred to someone, spent on something. And this is already legalization. Exactly according to this model, Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev in the second case were found guilty not only of oil theft, but also of money laundering. A simple trick - and the time frame is approximately doubled.

Or here’s a story told by lawyer Konstantin Rivkin: a small entrepreneur worked for two months without a license, his documents were being renewed by the licensing authority. The police accused him of illegal business, and at the same time imposed legalization: after all, the person paid taxes, thereby trying to give legal appearance to illegally acquired property. That is, legalize it.

Another great trick is to accuse the entrepreneur of fraud. This is an extremely unclear concept in the Criminal Code - there has long been a consensus among lawyers that it should be abandoned, replacing it with specific financial and economic compounds. But things are still there. Meanwhile, laundering is also ideally attached to fraud, as well as to illegal business (also an incorrect criminal concept - a legacy of the Soviet system) - and out of the blue we get two criminal charges.

The creative thought of financial controllers is not limited to lowering the threshold of severity of crimes related to laundering. Developing the idea that banks should control their clients, Rosfinmonitoring, in a separate amendment, obliges banks to identify beneficial owners. This is a strange measure: it is very easy to identify a beneficiary when registering a legal entity, but why do this for every financial transaction? And what do banks have to do with it?

about another amendment, endless in its corruption potential The head of Rosfinmonitoring, Yuri Chikhanchin, told Vladimir Putin . This is the abolition of bank secrecy for investigators: during operational-search activities, investigators will have the opportunity to monitor the movement of the suspect’s accounts. Considering how easy it is for us to open a criminal case against someone, and then, if there is no evidence, close it, it’s easy to guess that a new service will appear in the law enforcement price list: “Do you want to find out about the state of affairs of a competitor?”

Amendments to the Tax Code are also proposed to make it more difficult to register shell companies. This is a long overdue measure; the only question is whether these amendments will complicate the life of respectable entrepreneurs. Finally, the tons of paper reporting that they already receive from banks are not enough for financial controllers. The number of types of suspicious transactions that banks will have to inform Rosfinmonitoring about is increasing from 20 to 40. The amendments will be submitted to the government in early April, and the dialogue between Putin, Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Zubkov and Chikhanchin leaves no doubt that the green light has already been given to them. Even a green corridor stretching from Krasnopresnenskaya embankment to Okhotny Ryad.

With such frantic legislative activity of the security forces, it is not surprising that Moscow is falling in the ranking of international financial centers, dependence on oil is growing, and innovations are in no hurry to take root in the economy.

The new government, if it does not want to completely ruin the economy, clearly needs to cultivate some kind of powerful antidote against such legislative innovations - a strong and influential body that could block such proposals at the stage of internal departmental discussion, without frightening investors and without bringing them into obedience. State Duma. This body, working in the interests of the economy, in the interests of business and the business climate, must be so strong as to block even those initiatives of the security forces that are a priori attractive to the chairman of the government (and the newly elected president). Otherwise, only security forces will remain in the country, and there will be no business left.

Sabotage activities of Rosfinmonitoring