Title of the R&D project: Improvement of Ukrainian Legislation on Ensuring Security in the Banking Sector under Conditions of European Integration: Economic and Legal Aspect
Project leader: Klochkо Alona Mykolayivna, PhD in Law, Associate Professor
Implementation period: October 1, 2017 – September 30, 2020
Funding amount: 900 thousand UAH
The research identified the range of entities subject to protection within the banking security sector of Ukraine; defined banking institutions as special objects of criminological security and its components; established a set of effective methods for preventing offenses in the banking sector; proved the effectiveness of applying criminal law measures to safeguard Ukraine’s banking sector from unlawful encroachments; and proposed the implementation of positive EU experiences to protect Ukraine’s banking system.
There have already been attempts in Ukraine to criminalize certain actions within the banking security domain. In 2009, Draft Law No. 4334 (MP Yu.V. Prokopchuk) was submitted to the Verkhovna Rada, which proposed establishing criminal liability for failure to return deposits upon demand. In recent years, socially dangerous acts have been criminalized and incorporated into the Criminal Code of Ukraine: “Driving a bank to insolvency” (Article 217-1 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine) and “Violation of the procedure for maintaining the depositors’ database or reporting” (Article 220-1 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine).
O.O. Dudorov and R.O. Movchan noted that assigning the criminal law provision the number 218-1 contradicts the general rules for placing new articles in the Criminal Code of Ukraine. The scholars proposed placing these acts directly in Part 2 of Article 219 or assigning them the sequential number 219-1.
Some offenses in the banking sphere were decriminalized in 2011 according to the Law of Ukraine “On Amendments to Certain Legislative Acts of Ukraine Regarding the Humanization of Liability for Offenses in the Field of Economic Activity” dated November 15, 2011, No. 4025-VI. These included Article 202, “Violation of the procedure for engaging in economic activity and the provision of financial services.” According to N.O. Hutorova, the exclusion of these norms from the Criminal Code indicates their ineffectiveness and infrequent application. However, O.O. Dudorov emphasized that the rare application of a criminal law norm cannot be a sufficient reason for its decriminalization.
Daniel Dodman highlighted the necessity of introducing criminal liability for executives of banking institutions in the United Kingdom and South Africa, though his research did not address their inaction. Katalin Ligeti analyzed the rapid development and transformation of “economic” crimes in Europe and the USA. However, proposals for forming a system of criminal law protection of the banking sector and its structure have not been provided at either the international or national level. This constitutes the actual scientific novelty of this research.
