New criminal offence for businessmen in Belarus

The Security Council finds it necessary to make loss or illegal destruction of bookkeeping documents a new criminal offence. And not only that…

According to “Ezhednevnik”, such a proposal was made by the Security Council after an examination of financial crimes in Belarus and their investigation practice. Experts of the Security Council have paid attention to the fact that very many legal entities a without an intention to conduct statutory business activities are being created in Belarus. As a rule, a legal entity is registered for some third person (a pensioner, a disabled person or simply an alcoholic), who receives about $50 for that, and then that person does not even know what the firm he owns is doing. And later the company starts financial frauds.

Almost every financial investigation carried out by the Interior Ministry, the KGB or the Department of Financial Investigations of the State Control Committee in one way or another bump into activities of a false business organization. And people who offer their passports for registration, even after being summoned for interrogations continue to earn money in this undemanding way. There is no responsibility for that. So the Security Council has decided to put an end to that, as after a dozen of such frontmen are punished, the number of people who would agree to earn money in this way is to decrease.

Thus, the Security Council offers to consider an issue to make a number of amendments to the legal acts, including Article 234 of the Criminal Code of Belarus (pseudo-entrepreneurship). Today this article envisages criminal responsibility for “state registration as an individual entrepreneur or creation of a legal entity without an intention to carry out business activities or statutory activities in order to receive loans, credits, or as a front to prohibited activities, or to conceal or understate a profit or other taxable items, or to derive property benefit”.

As this phrasing shows, responsibility for registration could follow only in case when a founder member had had an aim to derive a profit for himself from the activities of a legal entity. But the stumbling point is that persons who give their passports for registration, are not interested with the further activities of a firm, and do not hope to get any profit from it in the future. And now it is offered that a person is criminally liable even when there had been no such aim.

The Security Council is also concerned by a great number of facts when businessmen destroy bookkeeping documents, and then simply shrug their shoulders and say: “We have lost them”. So investigation of many cases simply cannot be finished. That’s why the Security Council offers to introduce criminal responsibility for a loss or illegal destruction of bookkeeping documents.

The proposals have been forwarded to the Presidential Administration already, and it seems that they would be approved.