Poleschuk, O.V. Situation in the sphere of legalization of income attained by criminal means in accordance with the current criminal legislation

Abstract: The study concerns legalization of income attained by criminal means in accordance with the current criminal legislation. Attention is paid to the fact that several hundred thousand economic crimes are registered in Russia annually, and among these crimes tens of thousands of crimes are related to large and extra large criminal income (in 2010 – 51 969, in 2011 – 40 315, in 2012 – 36 083), which provides for their connection with “money laundering”. At the same time the correlation of these crimes and the crimes under the legalization of criminal income under Art. 174, 174.1 of the Criminal Code is just several per cent ( 3 per cent in 2010, 1,7 per cent in 2011, 1,4 per cent in 2012). Latent legalization of criminal income is related to the changing means of committing these crimes, complications with proving them, making revealing and investigation of such crimes difficult. In the opinion of the author the instability of criminal legislation and constant changes in the norms on criminal responsibility for the legalization of criminal income has a negative influence upon the use of proven preventive and interceptive measures against such crimes. The article contains analysis of practice and current legislation of Russia, allowing to use legal systems of credit and finances relations for the illegal purposes. Therefore, the investigation quality in the cases regarding legalization of criminal income, as guaranteed by revealing all circumstances, requiring proof, allows to uncover the factors facilitating money laundering and to solve the problems regarding destruction of the very economic basis for the crime, minimization of its development and reproduction. At the same time prophylactic measures are implemented both based on specific criminal cases, and upon the results of analysis of groups of cases, which is held in order to collect a wider range of information on crime and organization of activities of law-enforcement bodies in the sphere of fighting legalization of criminal profits. Improvement oft information guarantees also provides efficient means for fighting this type of criminal activities, since it allows for uncovering the sources for legalization of criminal income. To an extent, the Federal Financial Monitoring Service is an information and analytical body, which receives most of the information regarding suspicious deals and operations.

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