Russian Journal of Economics and Law (Sep 2018)
DEVELOPMENT OF THE OFFICIAL CORRUPTION CRIMES
Abstract
Objective: to establish regularities and assess the development of official corruption crime phenomenon.Methods: dialectical approach to the cognition of social phenomena, allowing to analyze them in the historical development and functioning in the context of a set of objective and subjective factors, which determined the choice of the following research methods: formal-logical, comparative-legal, statistical, documentary, sociological.Results: official corruption crime as a set of corruption crimes against the government, the interests of public service and service in local governments requires careful scientific analysis in order to establish the explicit and hidden patterns of devel- opment of bribery and other official intentional crimes with mercenary motivation. Explicit regularities include the downward trend of recorded facts and persons committing crimes under Articles 290-291.1. of the Russian Criminal Code. Identification of small bribery as a separate corpus delicti should be recognized as a successful decision of the legislator which allows registering the target indicators of struggling against the most dangerous manifestations of office corruption crime. This struggle is inertial: the attention of the law enforcement bodies is largely focused on the suppression of small bribery. The hidden regularities of official corruption crime development are revealed: concentration of corruption flows; increased tolerance of the civil mentality to bribery, as well as belief in declarative and imitation nature of anti-corruption; unacceptable introduction of the market economy in the activities of legislative, executive and judicial authorities; spreading of administrative racketeering as a manifestation of the management model based on such a basic element as irresponsibility. Illegal participation in entrepreneurial activity acts as a central element of official corruption, because it generates criminal and criminogenic practice of merging power and business. Article 289 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation “Illegal participation in entrepreneurial activity” does not possess the proper anti-corruption potential, as it is attributed by the legislator to crimes of small gravity, and also requires proof of illegal participation in entrepreneurial activity with the provision of benefits, advantages or other protection by an official. Scientific novelty: the original differentiation of the types of corruption crimes is proposed: electoral, economic, service-commercial, general criminal, environmental, employment, court, and administrative crimes. It is proposed to supplement Article 289 of the Russian Criminal Code with Part 2 as follows: “an act provided for in Part 1 of this Article, committed by prior agreement of a group of persons, shall be punished by imprisonment for up to 10 years”. Practical significance: the main provisions and conclusions can be used in legislative, scientific and educational activities for the development and coverage of the issues of anti-corruption policy optimization, and implementation of the national anti-corruption strategy.
Keywords
