The article analyzes the reasons and grounds by virtue of which the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation recognized the provisions of Chapter 12 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation on the limitation period not applicable to the prosecutor’s demands to deprive officials of property acquired as a result of corruption. On the way to this conclusion, the Court correlated the tasks of combating corruption with other values, studied specific historical conditions and social needs, and paid attention to the genesis of Russian statehood, its socio‑economic, political and legal systems. An assessment of all these aspects allowed the Court to conclude that the existence of deadlines limiting the possibility of filing anti heart‑corruption lawsuits is not a constitutional necessity, and the legislator has the right to refrain from setting them. The analysis of the empirical material presented in the article confirmed the reliability and indisputability of the conclusions of the constitutional control body. Latency is “sewn” into the act of corruption itself, since it is committed at the level of an official’s consciousness and under the guise of citizens’ acceptance of his actions as generally useful. Along with this, almost every step of an official is subordinated to the goal of hiding his enrichment at the expense of public goods. The study found no historical, doctrinal, or practical evidence that the need for plaintiffs to work with syndicates and the need to expose the beneficiaries behind them was taken into account when developing the statute of limitations. On the contrary, the known limitation periods were calculated exclusively for elementary and largely everyday transactions. It is not difficult for the defendants of this category to invent any documents that ostensibly indicate the expiration of the statute of limitations. In addition, it has been revealed that Federal Law No. 230‑FZ of 3 December 2012 is not intended to expose corruption schemes, and its presence in the system of current legislation creates the illusion that detecting corruption is not difficult and is detected by simple arithmetic calculations. Myths have been dispelled about the activities of law enforcement agencies to combat corruption, which allegedly destabilizes the stability of civil society, as well as about civics and its right, by analogy, to follow the example of the criminal law, which established a statute of limitations when prosecuting persons for crimes.
Sergey A. Bochkarev (Wed,) studied this question.