Head of the Office of the President Andriy Yermak held a meeting with members of the Ukrainian working group on Ukraine's participation in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
The participants discussed the work on the draft law on the liability of legal entities for international bribery. The introduction of efficient and effective anti-corruption mechanisms is one of the conditions for our country's participation in the OECD Working Group on Bribery.
"Keeping in mind the concept we discussed last time, I would like to focus on two areas: feedback from the OECD regarding the concept itself and the development of a corresponding draft law," Andriy Yermak addressed the attendees.
"We have to discuss how to work with this category of crimes, and decide whether the draft law meets the ideas and recommendations of the OECD, what needs to be changed, what to add, and listen to the expert opinion of NABU and SAP representatives," he added.
Deputy Head of the Office of the President Andriy Smyrnov, for his part, noted that the issue of this legislation is quite complex, as there is no unified global approach to the liability of legal entities in international business transactions that could be used in the development of domestic legislation.
"There are different models of applying the mechanism of liability of legal entities in different countries, so we discussed our developments and submitted them to the OECD, received from them an initial assessment of our concept and the draft law. We exchanged opinions beforehand. There are some issues, and our task is to solve them by adapting to the concept of introducing the liability of legal entities, which suits everyone," said Andriy Smyrnov.
According to him, the main and alternative working models of how to proceed in the development of Ukrainian legislation regarding the liability of a legal entity for the mentioned crimes are currently being considered. These are measures of administrative and civil liability, which are derived from criminal proceedings, which will be investigated by NABU.
The participants of the meeting discussed the nuances of each direction in order to choose the concept that would be the most effective and optimal in the Ukrainian legal environment.