The Illicit Enrichment Article: History, Challenges, and Results

It has been over six years since the Criminal Code was updated to include the illicit enrichment article. Since then, the number of criminal proceedings in this category has grown — yet virtually no senior official has ended up behind bars.

Does this point to a broader failure of the judicial system, or does the problem lie in the legislation itself, or perhaps in other factors? How does the illicit enrichment statute actually work, and what shapes its effectiveness? Our Senior Legal Advisor Pavlo Demchuk addressed these questions and more in a comment for Channel 24.

Among other things, he drew attention to the peculiarities of the article’s first version, which lawmakers attempted to introduce over a decade ago. At the time, it essentially duplicated the existing offense of “bribe-taking” — though that hardly mattered in practice, since that version never actually took effect. It was postponed repeatedly, abolished under Yanukovych, and then reinstated after the Revolution of Dignity in a new form that genuinely addressed illicit enrichment. It was in that post-Maidan period, following the creation of the NABU and the SAPO, that the first suspicion notices under this article were issued.

In February 2019, however, the norm was ruled unconstitutional. On this point, our expert notes the lack of unanimity within the Constitutional Court and cites dissenting opinions from individual judges — including Vasyl Lemak, who believed his colleagues could have grounded their ruling differently. By the autumn of that same year, a new version of the article had been adopted, and it remains in force to this day.

That said, the HACC has handed down effectively only two verdicts since then, and both were concluded through plea agreements. One of them involves former MP Iryna Kormyshkina, who was found guilty of illicit enrichment, among other charges. The verdict itself remains classified under the terms of the deal. Still, from public statements by prosecutors, it is known that the court ordered her to transfer UAH 20 million to the state and an additional 2 million to the needs of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. In essence, what is at stake here is a balance between a defendant’s desire for a reduced sentence and society’s expectation of receiving something in return.

It should also be noted separately that the absence of custodial sentences is less a systemic failure than a reflection of the internal logic of criminal procedure. Moreover, it is worth bearing in mind that electronic asset declarations — one of the key forms of evidence in illicit enrichment cases — were suspended following the start of the full-scale invasion. The true measure of the article’s effectiveness, therefore, is not the number of convictions, but the consistency of its application over time.