WTS Consulting/ KM Partners – a General partner of the V Annual Winter Forum on Criminal Law and Procedure

December 8, 2015

V Annual Winter Forum on Criminal Law and Procedure organized by the Ukrainian Advocates Association was held on December 4, 2015.

Topical issues such as criminal and criminal procedure legislation as well as practice in its application, in particular issues regarding criminal proceedings in absentia, peculiarities of defense in false entrepreneurship cases and practice in application of preventive measures in criminal proceedings on white collar crimes were discussed during the forum.

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WTS Consulting/ “KM Partners” Attorneys at Law became General Partner of the event. Senior of counsel and Attorney at Law Oleksiy Spivak jointly with of counsel and Attorney at Law Vasyl Cherednichenko participated in the event.

Vasyl Cherednichenko presented a speech under the topic “Current defense practice in the criminal proceedings on tax evasion”.

In particular, in his report Vasyl pointed out that according to statistics of the year 2014 and 9 months of 2015 only approximately 1.5 % of criminal proceedings under Article 212 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine (hereinafter referred to as “CC of Ukraine”) were transferred to the court with charges. The expert emphasized that the problem is in the systematic identification of any significant tax disputes with criminal offenses under Article 212 of the CC by Fiscal Service officers.

Vasyl also outlined basic elements of “tax evasion”: the intent in the actions of officials and arising of consequences of their acts – actual underpayment to the budget, and outlined the cases of lack of mandatory elements in the actions of the executives of the taxpayers.

In addition, the expert highlighted the Draft Law of Ukraine “On Amendments to the Tax Code of Ukraine regarding peculiarities of criminal process in cases related to taxes and regarding administration of taxes and charges” # 3448 as of 10.11.2015, which as proposed shall obligate the investigating authorities to close the criminal proceedings under Article 212 of the CC of Ukraine within 5 days after the discovering of one of the following facts: a) not-approving of monetary obligation; b) recognition of the tax decision as unlawful by court or by the higher tax authority; c) paying off the monetary obligation by the taxpayer within the period specified in para. 57.3 Article 57 of the TC of Ukraine.

icon_filetype_PDF-1 Download pdf-file of Vasyl Cherednichenko’s presentation (457 Kb).

Kind regards,

© WTS Consulting LLC, 2015