Subsidiary Liability as a Mechanism to Combat Criminal Bankruptcies: Development Prospects

The article analyzes mechanisms of counteraction to commission of criminal bankruptcies that are different in their nature: criminal-law mechanism of bringing to responsibility and civil-law mechanism of bringing to subsidiary liability. Subsidiary liability, as practice shows, is a more acceptable, understandable and controllable mechanism that allows to restore violated primarily property interests of persons participating in the bankruptcy procedure, who were harmed as a result of actions that constitute the composition of deliberate, fictitious bankruptcy or illegal actions during bankruptcy. Statistical data clearly demonstrate the active use of this mechanism by persons participating in the bankruptcy case, while both the number of applications for bringing to subsidiary liability and the share of satisfied applications of the injured party are systematically increasing. The analysis of already established approaches in law enforcement practice that resolve possible difficulties in bringing guilty persons to subsidiary liability is carried out. The conclusion is formulated on the parallelism of civil and criminal liability for the commission of similar illegal acts directly specified in the norms of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation and the Federal Law of the Russian Federation “On Insolvency (Bankruptcy)”, which in itself complicates the effective counteraction to the commission of bankruptcy offenses. The article indicates a number of advantages of subsidiary liability over the mechanism of bringing to criminal liability for the commission of a number of acts constituting a group of criminal bankruptcies, which makes it possible to decriminalize several crimes constituting a group of criminal bankruptcies, which in turn will have a positive effect on the application of the mechanism of bringing to subsidiary liability.