ALEXEY NOVIKOV SPOKE AT ‘BUSINESS UNDER DEFENSE’ VEDOMOSTI CONFERENCE

On June 22nd, Vedomosti hosted a conference, ‘Business Under Defense’. The conference gathered over 70 business representatives, consulting specialists, and former employees of law enforcement. The ongoing economic crisis makes the government seek a balance between business support and criminal law. On the one hand, there is an objective to support small and medium-sized businesses - on the other - a spike in financial crimes. Actions to decriminalize the activities in business operations have not borne fruit yet.

The conference was comprised of three sessions and addressed the issues of defending delimitation of managers’ and beneficiaries’ liabilities, corporate fraud and its prevention, algorithms of protection from criminal actions and minimization of criminal risks.

Alexey Novikov, Criminal Defense Firm Managing Partner, was invited as an expert and a moderator on the second session, ‘Internal Threat. Corporate Fraud, Compliance, and Forensics’. At the beginning of the session, Alexey disclosed statistics from the official Law Enforcement Agency report on a spike of financial and corruption-related crimes. For example, over 40,500 financial crimes were revealed in January-March this year. This number surpassed the rate of the previous year period by more than 7%. At that, financial damage by the mentioned crimes amounted to over 100 bn Russian rubles (over $13,760,000,000). Over 12,000 financial crimes on the record, 493 of which are associated with bribery and over 5,600 – with corruption. About 699 crimes are committed by business enterprises.

Further on the session’s speakers addressed the matters, such as:

• Viktoria Arutyunian, Head of Criminal Risks Management at ‘Cherkizovo’, on ‘Implementing A System of Corruption Risks Management In A Company’;
• Dmitriy Kalinichenko, Head of Criminal Practice Projects at KIAP law firm, on ‘Violation of Trade Secrets of A Company as a Criminal and Reputational Risk’;
• Egor Misyura, KPMG Partner, on ‘Proof and Corporate Fraud Damages Assessment’;
• Ilia Ulianenkov, VP of Legal Matters and Corporate Development at ‘Natsionalnaya Nerudnaya Kompaniya’, on ‘Issues of Proving Corporate Fraud Facts’.
• Alexey Novikov spoke on ‘Anti-corruption Compliance as a Security for Company’s Criminal Risks Minimization’. He focused on baseless corruption risks that spring up in companies, tackling the firm’s case. Moreover, he noted that compliance specialists could efficiently arrange anti-corruption compliance by cooperating with advocates specializing in particular fields.

Olga Matron, Head of Legal Department on Sales and Logistics Operations Support at Sibanthracite Group, acted as an expert of the session.