The book is written by Denis Anatolyevich Kunev, Deputy Head of the Information and Analytical Department of the General Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation, who for many years has been a member of the permanent delegations of the Russian Federation in the anti-corruption formats of the UN, OECD, APEC and a number of other international organizations, and is devoted to the study of the movement of funds and other assets obtained as a result of illegal, including corrupt, activities abroad and mechanisms for their search, seizure, confiscation and recovery
As Denis Kunev notes, at the international level, the issue of regulating asset recovery is reduced, first of all, to ensuring consistency between the regimes of international law and the domestic law systems of cooperating states, the achievement of which is complicated not only by different approaches of countries to building their criminal and criminal procedural legal systems, but also by differences in the sphere of other sectoral legislation and its individual institutions.
The first part of the book provides an overview of the legal foundations of international cooperation on the return of criminal assets, a review of the terminology used in international legal sources, a brief analysis of the scientific developments of domestic and foreign authors on international cooperation in combating the movement of criminal assets abroad and their subsequent return, as well as considered the main stages of asset recovery and the difficulties of mutual legal assistance.
The second part analyzes models of organization of financial monitoring as a type and method and financial control in individual countries, features of legislative regulation of search, seizure, confiscation and return of criminal assets in the USA, Switzerland and Great Britain, international practice of management (distribution) of frozen, seized and confiscated assets.
The third part is devoted to the establishment and development of financial monitoring in the Russian Federation, the existing regulation of criminal asset recovery, the peculiarities of seizure and confiscation of property, as well as the current regime of international cooperation in this area.
In addition, the appendices contain a number of documents related to the topic of asset recovery, including those translated into Russian for the first time, as well as practical recommendations developed by the author to organize the return of criminal assets from abroad to the Russian Federation. These recommendations, in our opinion, deserve special attention and will be extremely useful in improving the current regulatory framework.
The topic of the return of assets obtained as a result of criminal activity is actively discussed at various international platforms, including in the context of combating corruption. Thus, a separate section of the UN Convention against Corruption is devoted to asset recovery, the intensification of international cooperation in the field of asset recovery is recognized as one of the priorities of the G20 Anti-Corruption Group, the APEC Regional Network of Law Enforcement and Anti-Corruption Bodies in August 2018 approved the "Ten Recommendations on Asset Recovery", etc. Since 2007, there has been an active discussion of this topic.
The planned publication will be the first book in Russian on asset recovery in many years, and currently the only publication that examines in such detail the legal, terminological and substantive foundations of asset search, seizure, confiscation and recovery, as well as the specifics of the application of the relevant norms in a comparative perspective. Many of the normative legal acts of foreign countries, documents and recommendations of international organizations, materials of investigative and judicial practice considered in the work are introduced for the first time in the Russian-language scientific turnover.