Журнал ЗАКОН

The author describes the general model of actions of the person who is entrusted with the care of someone else’s property or personality, including the scope of this person’s duties and the basis of his responsibility.

---

Keywords: management, care, guardianship, fiduciary duties

The article attempts to define the scope of duties of a trustee, its standard of behavior and the rules of bringing it to responsibility under the trust management agreement. The author comes to the conclusion that any trustee should be responsible under the rules of professional standard of conduct. Russian law does not provide for the possibility of non-professional trust management. Although most countries in the world set a standard of behavior of a trustee (bonus pater familias), when engaging any trustee, his professional qualities, experience and knowledge are also to be taken into account. In the absence of fiduciary responsibility in Russian law, the choice in the trustee’s responsibility is between the responsibility of a professional and the responsibility for risk.

---

Keywords: trust contract, trustee, contractual liability, fault, forms of fault, risk, standard of behavior

Sham holding of assets is a legal regime of the beneficiary’s property held by a fictitious owner for unfair purposes (such as concealment from its being recovered by creditors or divided in case of inheritance or divorce, etc.). The awareness by the sham owner of his status and the “incompleteness” of his rights are the key signs of this legal regime. Court action based on the appearance (pretense) is a primary way to protect interested parties in such circumstances, regardless of what the sham holding is based on — contractual obligation, corporate actions, trust relations, etc. The inclusion of concealed property into bankruptcy estate, inheritance, or common property of the spouses without challenging the underlying transactions on the grounds of the abuse of law may apply when special ways of protection (in particular, bringing the sham owner to joint and several liability) are not available.

---

Keywords: sham owner, sham transaction, beneficiary, fiduciary transactions, trust, bankruptcy estate, hereditary property

The article examines the current issues of the institute of collective management of copyright and related rights. The author substantiates the agency nature of legal relations arising from an agreement between copyright holders and collective management organisations. It argues in favour of necessity to extend the institute of collective management to such ways of using musical and musicaldramatic works as their inclusion in a complex object and making them publicly available. The judicial practice according to which allows to compel the user to conclude a remuneration agreement with an accredited collective management organisation is critically evaluated. Some changes to the existing model of participation of collective management organisations in the protection of copyright and related rights are proposed.

---

Keywords: Intellectual property, copyright law, related rights, collective management of copyright and related rights, license agreement, orphan works, protection of copyright and related rights

This article analyses the regulatory approaches of international organisations as they apply to digital asset management. These approaches touch upon general and special issues of crypto-asset service providers’ activities. In the first case, these are possible principles, models of regulation and its structure. In the second case, the specifics of requirements in the case of centralised and decentralised management of digital assets.

---

Keywords: digital assets, crypto service providers, decentralised finance, smart contracts, Financial Stability Board, Bank for International Settlements, IOSCO, FATF

In the turbulent conditions of the modern world, resolving such issues as protection of assets, possibility of their preservation and subsequent transfer to worthy successors can hardly be considered irrelevant. The question arises whether there is a legal mechanism that is universal both for managing and structuring the owner’s assets “here and now”, and for achieving various goals in the long term, not limited by the life of the founder. In March 2022, an institution that clearly claims to be considered in this perspective — a personal fund — has been introduced into Russian law.

---

Keywords: personal fund, asset management, taxation, inheritance

The article discusses the most popular inheritance planning mechanisms currently available to Russian citizens both in the Russian Federation and in foreign jurisdictions. The authors emphasise the tax aspects of inheritance planning and compare different instruments in terms of their tax efficiency. Personal funds created as analogues of foreign structures (trusts and foundations) are of particular interest in the Russian Federation, especially given the recent changes in the tax treatment of personal funds. At the same time, the creation of foreign structures continues to enjoy well-deserved popularity. The article discusses the main tax aspects that require attention when setting up overseas structures for inheritance planning purposes.

---

Keywords: inheritance fund, personal fund, tax planning

Almost a quarter of the world’s largest companies nowadays are stateowned, and their role as global competitors is growing in proportion to the expansion of market boundaries beyond the geographical borders of states. Since the competition between states for political influence has long moved to the field of economic relations, the effectiveness of state-owned transnational corporations has become a key condition for the success of such a struggle. Multidirectional trends in increasing the efficiency of state-owned companies, on the one hand, and strengthening the role and intervention state-shareholder into the business relations, on the other, are the dilemma of the modern world. Is there an perfect method that will simultaneously develop the economy and solve social and political problems?

---

Keywords: state-owned enterprises, protection from undue influence, efficiency of state-owned enterprises, conflict of interest, corruption, ACI principles, SOE principles, best corporate governance practices, noninterference in operating activities

The Article discusses misinterpreted period in the life of one of the leading Russian lawyers, Anatoly Koni. After 1917, he stayed in Soviet Russia, and this fact is often viewed as his loyalty to the new Soviet authorities. Following his writings, public speeches and especially unknown letters to his friends and colleagues, the author disproves this view. Koni was highly critical to the new authority and waited for its dismissal. His position may well be described as е´migration intе´rieure.

---

Keywords: Anatoly Koni, Bolsheviks, White Russian émigrés, 1864 Court Statutes, Soviet Russia, Russian Empire

The article examines the issues of the normative legitimacy of the International Criminal Court, which is understood as the conformity of the creation and operation of the court with the norms and principles of international law, as well as with the conditions of consent of States regarding the status of this court, competence and jurisdiction formulated in the Rome Statute as the founding document of the court. The current practice of the ICC and the Prosecutor of the Court in some fundamental issues has clearly departed from the conditions for the exercise of their jurisdiction enshrined in the Rome Statute, which calls into question the normative legitimacy of such actions of the Court and the Prosecutor. States, after two decades of the Court’s activity, have clearly not received the court they expected, developing and agreeing on the provisions of the Rome Statute, which may give States sufficient grounds to stop considering this court as a legitimate source of judicial power

---

Keywords: International Criminal Court, Rome Statute, normative legitimacy

In the Legal Chronicle of the February issue we offer commentaries on the December 2023 Supreme Court’s Review of practice on tax benefit, the Decision of the Judicial Collegium for Civil Cases of the Supreme Court on the possibility of invalidating transactions on the transfer of money in the form of bribes and applying the consequences of their invalidity by forfeiting such money; on the conclusions of the Commission of the Council of Judges on Ethics regarding the legality of additional salaries for judges, as well as on the decisions of the Constitutional Court on labour and civil law adopted in December 2023.

---

Keywords: tax benefit, tax liability, underpayment, bribe, confiscation, invalidity of transactions, restitution, Constitutional Court, judicial ethics

The article delineates between concepts that closely relate to economic basis of tax, such as the subject matter of tax, taxable item, tax base, source of tax, and function of tax. Also, the author clarifies the legislative definition of the taxable item and the tax base and provides a classification of taxes by types of the tax base and of taxable economic benefit.

---

Keywords: economic basis of tax, taxable item, tax base, source of tax, function of tax

For many years, the primary challenges in the legal sphere regarding language in legal proceedings have been the utilisation of national languages of the republics and foreign access to justice. However, the authors of this paper hypothesise that citizens and organisations of Russian origin often require assistance in translating “legal Russian” to “everyday Russian”. This is due to the continuing syntactic complexity found in court decision language despite widespread attempts to simplify the presentation of information. The authors’ previous research into speech practices of laws and bylaws supports this hypothesis. The authors designed research questions to investigate the hypothesis of changes in the comprehensibility of the language used in court decisions over time. Additionally, they aimed to determine whether such changes depend on the type of courts, the category of cases, or the court instance level. Empirical research methods were used to examine not only whole court decisions but also their elements. Moreover, a representative sample exceeding 15,000 texts was studied. The analysis was conducted at different parts in court decisions including introduction, description, reasoning, and operation. Additional fragments such as facts, citations of legal acts, analysis of evidence, and judge’s conclusions were also studied. The methods of computational linguistics confirmed a consistent increase in the syntactic complexity of court decisions over time. According to the author’s methodology, court decisions are among the most complex legal texts. In essence, legal acts citations contribute to the bulk of these texts, making up the largest proportion (40% on average) in the descriptive and reasoning parts of the decision, compared to other semantic fragments. The research enabled the authors to compile a catalogue of detrimental speech practices used in court decisions, alongside recommendations for their rectification.

---

Keywords: accessibility of justice, language of justice, language of judgments, language comprehensibility, syntactic complexity, readability, structure of judgments, computational linguistics

The article critically analyses the provisions of Art. 7.1 of Federal Law No. 115-FZ “On Combating the Legalisation (Laundering) of Income...”, which oblige a number of persons, including advocates, to identify their client and monitor the movement of his funds in transactions. The authors point out the existing legal conflict due to different approaches to the interpretation of public duties, on the one hand, and the peculiarities of confidentiality relations that arise when exercising the right to receive qualified legal assistance, on the other hand. In the absence of a clear answer, there is nothing left but the personal discretion of each advocate on how to understand and fulfill the duties assigned by law and seek a reasonable balance of constitutionally protected values and competing rights. This is evidenced by the explanations of the authorized bodies.

---

Keywords: anti-money laundering law, advocate-client privilege, competing values, confidentiality

Changes in federal legislation in 2014 provided the state authorities of the Russian Federation with the opportunity to redistribute municipal powers in the field of urban planning. To date, more than half of the regions have already taken advantage of the granted right, however, both in the scientific literature and in the expert community there are a small number of works devoted to the analysis and evaluation of this issue. The article presents the results of a study of the practices of redistribution of powers between the state authorities of the Russian Federation and local governments in the field of urban planning. As a methodology, a combination of verification methods and elements of system-logical analysis is used to describe and analyse the main characteristics and typical models of the redistribution of municipal powers in the field of urban planning, as well as correlation analysis to study the possible motives for such redistribution. The results confirm the lack of system and discretion of the state authorities in choosing the number of municipalities and municipal powers for redistribution. At the same time, the motive for redistribution, apparently, is their desire to have a greater influence on the administrative procedures associated with the implementation of housing building. All this opens up prospects for further research on this issue and the search for guidelines for meaningful control over the adopted laws on redistribution and rethinking the role of the state authorities of the Russian Federation in the field of urban planning and development.

---

Keywords: centralisation of management, redistribution of municipal powers, urban planning