Seized with flaws

The Prosecutor General announced problems with the sale of ex-property of corrupt officials

The state has decided to dig into its pockets and calculate how much income the so-called anti-corruption lawsuits bring it, when, on the initiative of the prosecutor’s office, property whose value exceeds their income is confiscated from officials, including former ones, or when a second citizenship is discovered among the owners of strategic enterprises.

As colleagues from The Bell* calculated, starting from 2022, assets worth up to 6.5 trillion rubles have been confiscated in this manner. According to the Accounts Chamber, we are talking about only 100 billion rubles. (here, apparently, we mean only successfully resold property). But in any case, hundreds of companies were subject to nationalization, and the consideration of such cases in district (regardless of the volume of property!) courts takes place in one to three sessions.

At the board of the Prosecutor General's Office on Friday, Prosecutor General Alexander Gutsan reproached his subordinates for not monitoring the further fate of the property seized based on their claims, and it is being sold too slowly. According to the Accounts Chamber, the share of successfully sold goods does not exceed 8% of the volume seized. “Situations where property complexes continue to generate income for those from whom they were confiscated, are illegally used by third parties or fall into disrepair due to improper maintenance, I consider discrediting all previously carried out work,” Gutsan threatened.

He still doesn’t say anything: the property that is subject to registration is mainly confiscated, and this, in addition to bank accounts, is commercial and residential real estate, cars and operating enterprises. From this list it is easy to deal only with money and resell cars.

Other property, if “inadequately maintained,” may not only not bring profit, but also generate losses - at least for the period that it is on the balance sheet of the Federal Property Management Agency, the state does not receive taxes (or transfers money from pocket to pocket).

A representative of the Accounts Chamber linked the ineffective sale of seized property not with the quality of work of prosecutors or the Federal Property Management Agency, but with “fundamental problems.” In particular, the Federal Bailiff Service “often transfers assets with a large number of encumbrances”... What are these encumbrances and where do they come from?

This year, bailiffs finally evicted the 85-year-old mother of the former head of the Serpukhov district, Alexander Shestun, from her only home (his wife and children were evicted even earlier). This is an echo of the decision of the Krasnogorsk court, which back in 2019, in parallel with the investigation of the criminal case, made a decision to confiscate Shestun’s property “worth 10 billion rubles.” This was, as far as we know, one of the first cases of filing an “anti-corruption claim” under the law “On control over the compliance of expenses of persons holding public positions and other persons with their income” dated December 3, 2012 No. 230-FZ.

The first precedent showed that such claims, which are rather administrative in nature, although they are considered in accordance with Federal Law-230 according to the rules of the Civil Procedure Code, the prosecutor's office (plaintiff) and the courts ignore the requirements of the Civil Code in terms of property rights.

Property is nationalized without detail, “chock”, but in 1-3 meetings it is impossible to do otherwise. The confiscated estate also includes property registered in the name of relatives and “affiliated persons,” who are also indiscriminately considered “nominal owners.” Meanwhile, we are talking about complex property complexes, companies most often have legal co-owners, some objects are leased, some are pledged, some already live somewhere, and these are bona fide purchasers.

In the Shestun case, for example, the owners lost their real estate who simply, without suspecting anything, bought land plots for dachas in the Serpukhov region. Already the first such case showed that in the framework of “anti-corruption lawsuits” prosecutors ignore the interests of third parties, and judges make decisions as if the property has already been “cleared of encumbrances” (from the speech of the Prosecutor General).

The “fundamental problem” is related to the very practice of considering so-called anti-corruption claims. Property should be “cleared” not after its seizure, but during the court process, where interested third parties should also be given the floor, and only then bailiffs will be able to effectively enforce such decisions.

The problem is that in this case, the processes would take not 1-3 days, but months, and would require high qualifications on the plaintiffs’ side, which the prosecutor’s office is not always able to provide. And the amounts collected would have looked much more modest.

So it is not the bailiffs who “discredit” the nationalization process (Gutsan), but the prosecutors and judges themselves.

* Included in the register of “foreign agents”.