National Agency for Corruption Prevention will not provide general explanations

The National Agency for the Prevention of Corruption cannot provide clarifications on general issues of the application of legislation. They have an undefined status and differ from the logic of the profile law.

So says the first deputy head of the Verkhovna Rada Ruslan Stefanchuk. The People's Deputy has prepared and submitted to the Parliament a draft on clarification of some provisions of the Law "On the Prevention of Corruption" (reg. No. 4137 of 21.09.2020).

The author of the legislative initiative draws attention to the fact that the current editions of Art. Art. 24, 28 of the Law oblige the NAPC to provide consultations to the subjects of the declaration in case they have doubts about the possibility of receiving a gift or the presence of a conflict of interest in specific circumstances.

However, the agency, guided by the vague wording of paragraph 15 of part 1 of Art. 11 of the Law, began to systematically publish general clarifications on anti-corruption legislation (for example, regarding financial control measures, regarding the legal status of the whistleblower). And such explanations, although they are unfounded and often contradictory, are used by special subjects in the field of combating corruption and even by the courts.

Therefore, R. Stefanchuk proposed to clarify the powers of the NACP, which should provide precisely individual explanations and only on the basis of requests from entities subject to the Law on the Prevention of Corruption.

The draft also proposes to clarify the range of such entities in terms of persons equated to those authorized to perform the functions of the state (clause 2 of part 1 of article 3). These will include persons who permanently or temporarily hold positions of managers, deputy heads of legal entities of public law, and persons who permanently or temporarily hold positions of members of the executive body or are members of the supervisory board of a joint-stock company (except for a state bank), in the authorized capital of which is more than 50 percent of the shares (stakes, shares) directly or indirectly belong to the state.