The State Duma believes that excessive zeal in "wresting" debts from debt collectors should result in actual imprisonment. In the middle of March 2021 a group of deputies offered to supplement the RF Criminal Code with a new Article 172.4 "Illegal activity on return of overdue debts of physical persons". Deputies propose to toughen penalties for violence against debtors, destruction or damage of their property. The guilty could face up to 12 years in prison if they were engaged not alone but as a group, as stated in the bill submitted to the State Duma. Experts assess the proposed innovations in a controversial way.

The current penalties for collectors for intimidating, beating and damaging the property of debtors are ineffective and should be stricter, according to the State Duma.

If this initiative is approved, collectors will be fined for 300-500 thousand rubles, or imprisoned for up to 5 years, if they used violence towards debtors, or threatened them, or destroyed or damaged their property, or spread false information about them, or defamed their honor and dignity. Collectors will get up to 12 years for similar actions, if they acted in an "organized group".

Alexander Pavlovsky, a partner of A.T.Legal explained to The Profile: "The initiative of introducing a separate criminal responsibility for debt collectors deserves attention because the problem of impunity and impudence of employees of compulsory debt collection agencies still remains acute. The statistics shows that the need for more efficient preventive and punitive measures in order to avoid illegal acts of debt collectors is long overdue. Now the violation of the law on the protection of rights and legitimate interests of individuals in recovering overdue debts provides only administrative rather than criminal liability measures, which, as practice has shown, were not enough to deter unscrupulous debt collectors. The explanatory note to the discussed draft law states that the application of the prohibited methods of influence on debtors is currently carried out by unidentified individuals who cannot be connected with creditor organizations or persons acting on behalf of creditors or in their interests. In this case the criminal intelligence operations within a criminal case initiated under a special anti-collectors' article will be effective. Moreover, now even if the victim applies to the law enforcement authorities the chance of bringing the perpetrators to justice is low due to the insignificant nature of violations from viewpoint of the current criminal law. The police are notoriously reluctant to deal with such petty offences. The law enforcement officials' reaction will have to change if the bill on criminal liability of debt collectors is passed. 

Now collectors are criminally liable only on general grounds and for specific offences committed by them, such as destruction of property (Article 167 of the Criminal Code), inflicting bodily harm, extortion, etc. And each of these crimes can be investigated by different law enforcement agencies. In practice, this would mean that victims would have to file several complaints, risking the refusal with reference to the non-criminal nature of the acts committed, since the punishment for them is provided by the administrative rather than criminal code, come to deliberately ineffective interrogations, etc. If the responsibility of collectors will be consolidated under one article of the Criminal Code, it will allow to fight more effectively against unscrupulous collectors. But until the bill is adopted, victims of collectors' actions should apply to the law enforcement agencies with statements of offense committed against them on general grounds."

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