UBA NEWS

UBA Committee on Banking, Finance and Insurance Law

The UBA Committee on Banking, Finance and Insurance Law held a round table with the participation of representatives of the banking and finance domain on 9 April 2015. Current issues touched upon the relationship of depositors/debtors, banks and the state in the light of the new Act of Ukraine On Amending of Certain Legislative Acts of Ukraine as to Responsibility of Persons Related to the Bank of 2 March 2015, No.218-VIII (that came into force on 8 March 2015).

Dmytro Melash, legal analyst of Gryphon Investment Consulting Group, provided participants with a comprehensive review of the novelties stipulated by the Act, namely on grounds of banks’ rating as a problem or insolvent, expansion of information disclosure on the structure of a bank’s ownership and key persons and owners of mediate considerable share, new approaches for determining persons related to a bank and enhancement of their administrative, criminal and civil responsibility.

Marina Saienko, partner of Law Company Zakon Peremogy, analyzed judicial practice on making the owners of the majority share and related persons responsible and discussed the future prospects of impact of the Act on changes to the practice of making banks’ owners responsible in criminal and property aspects. The speaker adduced all the widespread schemes of assets shifting from bringing banks’ to insolvency and noted that enforcement practice is not so common.

At the end participants came to the conclusion that the Act does not solve all the present problems with illegal actions of banks’ owners and does not make application of the above-mentioned schemes impossible.

UBA Taxation Committee Meeting

A meeting of the UBA Taxation Committee was held on 21 April 2015. A regular meeting was devoted to applying the decisions of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Ukrainian tax disputes.

Gleb Bialyi, co-head of litigation practice at Egorov Puginsky Afanasiev & Partners Ukraine, and Arsen Miliutin, deputy head of UBA Committee on Procedural Law, co-head of the tax disputes practice, attorney, senior associate of EPAP, presented a smart interactive presentation about purposes of ECHR. Thus, associates played the roles of God’s and Devil’s advocates, modeling philosophical aspects of a fight between positive law and natural law, citing as examples conceptions of predictability and quality of tax law and practical application of conceptions in the administrative process.

Kyrylo Nominas, attorney, associate partner of Sokolovskyi and Partners, spoke on the practice of the ECHR and tax disputes in Ukraine and gave advice to be used in tax disputes in our country.

In the course of the meeting speakers considered the question as to whether the ECHR was established to resolve tax disputes? It was clarified that the ECHR earlier identified tax disputes as unacceptable to try. However, it recently changed its practice.