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A rope with one end
Last week, the Constitutional Court was the scene of heated debates on a purely formal issue: whether there is a statute of limitations for corruption crimes (see Kommersant, October 9). From an outside observer's perspective, it is not easy to put the eyebrows back on the forehead. The law on control of public service expenses has been in effect since 2013, and dozens of cases have already been resolved. How can such a fundamental problem remain unresolved? But this is not a question of format.
The issue is broader, namely the unfinished debate about the fate of an ever-growing pool of assets (their total value is more than 1 trillion rubles, according to the prosecutor's office). These are enterprises privatized in 2022-2024 in accordance with the needs of the state due to various violations committed by their owners. The well-known ChEMZ and Makfa are just the tip of this iceberg, which has already required new state regulation (see Kommersant, July 11) and a solution to the "technical and legal" problems that arose when the owner changed (see Kommersant, August 26).
In the absence of a statute of limitations for "corruption" violations, it will inevitably be necessary to discuss the statute of limitations and other issues that would allow the owner to be freed from the burden of assets. Let me remind you that this issue was raised by the Union of Russian Industrialists and Entrepreneurs at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum last summer, where President Vladimir Putin advocated regulating this in a separate law and preventing mass deprivations.
However, this work is not finished and is unlikely to be carried out systematically. Once you start applying the “confiscation” norms that lawyers warned the Russian authorities about back in the 2000s, it will be difficult to stop. Every asset is a participant in the production chain. If you could control it, why not set a target? In the neighborhood? When the statute of limitations expires, the formula “There is no statute of limitations for crimes against society and the country” applies.
But common sense suggests that the prospect of endlessly unraveling some threads may not be appealing to those who want control over property that is not yet theirs. “Your freedom is our fault,” the security forces say, to the dismay of many. It is borderline and not taken as a joke. The authorities’ desire to limit asset seizures to a “separate law” may prove too complex a basis for them to get bogged down in disputes or to renew disputes in their attempts to apply the law.
Preventing the redistribution of wealth would require a simple tweaking of existing law enforcement agencies, and this appears to have already begun. On September 10, the Second Arbitration and Appeal Court for the first time completely rejected the prosecutor's claim to confiscate shares from the owners of the Ivanovo Heavy Machinery Plant on the grounds that the statute of limitations had not expired.