Receipt of illegal remuneration by an ex-officer: law, theory, practice

Abstract

The article deals with the issues of criminal-legal assessment of situations when an official for a specified remuneration performs the necessary actions (inaction) in the service, and the remuneration itself is received after the loss of the officials status (deferred bribe). The author criticizes the established judicial practice of qualifying such cases as the final receipt and giving of a bribe, since it directly violates the provisions of Articles 3, 8, 29, 290, 291 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. If the recipient of the remuneration is not an official, then his act cant be qualified as a completed bribe-taking by an official by virtue of the law. The article proves that the only correct variant of the criminal-legal assessment of the offense in such cases is the imputation for the ex-official the preparation for receiving a bribe under Article 290 of the Criminal Code with reference to Part 1 of Article 30 of the Criminal Code. Equally, in the actions of the bribe-giver in the analyzed situation from the standpoint of the current version of the criminal law, the author sees only a conspiracy with an official to give-receive a bribe, that is, preparation for giving a bribe, qualified under Article 291 of the Criminal Code with reference to Part 1 of Article 30 of the Criminal Code. In conclusion, it is stated that the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation has an obvious gap in investigated part, which requires elimination by amending the criminal law (after a thorough and balanced discussion of their draft).