Restricting Competition (Article 178 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation): Theoretical and Law‑Enforcement Issues

The paper presents the results of a doctrinal and comparative study of criminal legislation and practice concerning liability for cartel conduct, and analyzes the constituent elements (corpus delicti) of the relevant offence. It is shown that the legal object of the offence is the state of the market for goods, works and services, i.e., the institutional conditions that afford formally equal economic actors equal opportunities to obtain profit and enable consumers to choose among available offers. The double reference to «restrictions on competition» in Part 1 of Article 178 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation does not expand the catalogue of criminally relevant elements. The statutory disposition, which names the offence and describes the prohibited conduct, is formulated in general criminal-law terms, while the concrete content of the proscribed behavior is determined by sectoral economic regulation. The study further demonstrates that quantitative (value-based) thresholds (for example, the amount of income or benefit) are employed to assess the public danger of the act and to delimit administrative responsibility from criminal responsibility. Such thresholds indicate the scale of unlawful activity rather than merely its economic outcome, thereby imparting a criminal character to the conduct. The author emphasizes the relevance of actual «causing of damage:» competitor conduct (e.g., price-fixing, market-division, discriminatory contract terms) can inflict tangible harm on other market participants. Finally, the paper identifies and explicates several non-obvious qualifying elements of the offence under considertion.

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