On the ways to improve the Russian criminal legislation protecting public relations in economic activities
Authors:   Tomsk State University, Lozinskiy Igor V. 
Published: February 2023

The article aims at analysing the changes to Chapter 22 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation on the basis of the Federal Laws of the Russian Federation No. 500-FZ of December 27, 2019; No. 73-FZ of April 1, 2020; No. 352-FZ of October 27, 2020. The analysis has shown that the introduced changes are not sufficient to improve the Chapter, since they affected only an insignificant part of its norms. The introduced changes have expanded the scope of Article 191 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, since its new version provides for the liability for not only the illegal circulation of precious metals, natural precious stones, or pearls, but also for the illegal circulation of amber, jade, or other semi-precious stones. In addition, its Part 1 now contains an administrative prejudice. Part 1 of Article 193 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation has also included an administrative prejudice after the above changes. Its new version has expanded such evaluative dimensions as “large scale” and “extra large size”, which has narrowed its scope. In its turn, these changes can be interpreted as the liberalisation of criminal law that protects public relations in economic activities. The legislator has precisely specified the amounts of “large” and “extra large” in Articles 198, 199, 199.1, 199.3, 199.4 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. Chapter 22 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation has included Article 200.7 to provide for liability for bribing an arbitrator, which indicates the “expanded” interference of criminal law into economic activities. This “expansion” is to eliminate the legislative gap in the chapter under study. However, the analysis of Articles 169, 178, 183, 189, 190, 194 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation has revealed certain shortcomings of the legislative structures, which means that the considered changes failed to improve the Chapter. Yet, the comparative analysis of other norms that make up Chapter 22 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation has demonstrated that most of these norms provide for criminal liability for acts that, by their legal nature, do not constitute an encroachment on social relations in economic activities. Thus, the improvement of the criminal legislation protecting social relations requires the norms prohibiting the acts that are not encroachments on these relations to be transferred from Chapter 22 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation to its other Chapters. The analysis has made it possible to correctly establish the range of crimes against public relations in economic activities. They are crimes under Articles 171, 171.2, 171.3, 171.4, 172, 172.1, 172.2, 172.3, 178, 183, 195, 196, and 197 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. By their legal nature, these acts are various manifestations of unfair competition. Therefore, the improvement should also include the criminalisation of new forms of its manifestation, such as discrediting the business reputation of legal entities, misleading consumers, and lending illegal loans of all types. However, decriminali-sation of certain acts prohibited by Chapter 22 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation can be also considered as a way to improve the criminal code that protects public relations in economic activities.