Parliament Restores Property Confiscation When Concluding Plea Agreement in Corruption Crimes

On December 5, the Verkhovna Rada voted for the draft law No. 12243-1, which had been registered by a group of MPs the day before.

It supplements Article 77 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine with a provision that will allow negotiating the confiscation of property with a suspect or accused who concludes an agreement on exemption from real punishment for a corruption or corruption-related criminal offense.

This is a much better provision than the one proposed by MPs in draft law No.10242, which was sent for a repeated second reading on December 4, but the mechanism for asset confiscation in corruption cases will still have shortcomings. That’s because:

• confiscation of property as a punishment cannot help to achieve the goals of recovering criminal property, which is registered to frontpeople;
• special forfeiture, which allows the recovery of such assets, is still not a priority in the conclusion of plea agreements;
• current legislation does not allow the seizure of assets for the application of “expanded” confiscation, a tool provided for by the CPC of Ukraine for the recovery of unlawful assets from convicted persons for corruption and money laundering. 

Although the draft law 12243-1 regulates the issue of property confiscation better than the adopted law on the improvement of plea agreements in corruption cases did, the matter still needs to be finalized considering the comments we have mentioned. 

Read more about the problems with property confiscation from high-ranking corrupt officials in the study by TI Ukraine.