The number of raider seizures in Ukraine has been increasing since 2014. This is reported by OpenDataBot, referring to the statistics of the General Prosecutor's Office.
Since 2013, there have been 1690 illegal seizures in Ukraine, 539 happened in the last year and a half. At the same time, the greatest number of asset-grabbing occurred in 2017 - 414, the smallest number of them was registered by the Prosecutor General's Office in 2014 - only 234 cases.
Most often illegal seizures occur in Kyiv and the Kyiv oblast. Over the past 5 years, 397 attacks have been registered. The Dnipropetrovsk oblast (133) is on the second place and the Lviv (104) region is on the third.
The Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine sees illegal seizures as violations under two articles of the Criminal Code: counteraction to legal economic activity (Article 206 of the Criminal Code) and unlawful seizure of the property of the enterprise, institution, organization (Article 206-2 of the Criminal Code). Counteraction to legitimate economic activity occurs almost three times more often.
"Real statistics can differ from the data of the General Prosecutor's Office. First of all, in a large number of cases, criminal proceedings are not opened at all, since it is covered by corrupt law enforcers. In some cases, criminal proceedings are opened on other articles of the criminal code, for example, hooliganism, illegal handling of weapons, so such cases may not fall into this statistics. As we see from the data given, less than 1% of cases are sent to court, and most are closed because law enforcers try to avoid investigation, so in most cases asset-grabbing falls under economic jurisdiction. This also indicates the unskilled work of the prosecution to collect evidence when the lawyers successfully defend their clients using the errors of the investigation", - lawyer Maksym Lazarev explains.
According to him, recently, some positive effect was given by "anti-raid" changes in the legislation, which returned the duty to notarially certify the signatures of persons on the statute and added a certification of signatures on the minutes of the meeting.
"The Anti-Raid Commission at the Ministry of Justice has also started working. It can cancel the registration action rather quickly and leave the dishonest registrar without work", - he adds.
Raiding is usually associated with the actions of registrars or with court decisions on the change of property rights, the composition of founders or managers of the enterprise.