Transfer by officials of their assets (first of all, securities and shares in organizations) into trust management is one of the measures for prevention/regulation of conflict of interest. The necessity of its adoption is explained by the fact that the presence of interests in a company within the scope of his official powers may encourage an official to give preferential treatment to this company and, accordingly, lead to bias and partiality of the official.

However, the use of "traditional" forms of trust management - when a person transfers his or her assets to a trustee, but still has information about their condition, quantity and value and can give instructions to the trustee regarding the disposition of such assets - does not meet the anti-corruption objective in practice. In fact, by continuing to control the assets transferred into trust management, the official still remains in a situation of conflict of interest.

In this regard, the use of special forms of trust management, such as "blind trusts", is more preferable for anti-corruption purposes.

When using "blind trusts", the official actually loses information about the state of his/her assets and cannot give instructions to the trustee aimed at obtaining personal benefits for the official on the basis of information known to him/her by virtue of his/her position or give unjustified preferences in the performance of his/her official duties to organizations in which he/she has an interest.

The authors of the report consider the peculiarities of application of special forms of trust management on the example of foreign countries that have developed the most detailed legislation in this area: the United States, Canada, South Korea and Chile.

Taking into account that in practice the creation and implementation of an effective model of specialized trust management is an extremely difficult task, the authors highlight a number of questions that legislators need to find answers to before introducing such mechanisms, for example:

• What categories of officials are subject to the relevant norms?
• Who selects the trustee?
• Who can be a trustee and how is its independence ensured?
• What restrictions are imposed on the trustee's communication with the official transferring his or her assets to the trustee?

etc.

For each of these questions, the authors consider the approaches used by countries and the main advantages and disadvantages of their chosen solutions.

The presented report is one of the few publications devoted to the use of special forms of trust management for the purposes of conflict of interest regulation, and the first such analytical work in Russian.

Although the use of such mechanisms involves certain difficulties and there are no single "successful" models of their implementation, the authors of the report hope that the analysis will be useful at least to intensify the discussion of these instruments in academic circles, and in the future may be used in the development of a system of special trust management by legislators of countries wishing to introduce such mechanisms in their country.