Business in Ukraine: Legally Speaking

Meeting with Serhiy Shklyar, Deputy Minister of Justice of Ukraine for Enforcement Service

On  21 September the Chamber held a meeting with Serhiy Shklyar, Deputy Minister of Justice of Ukraine on Executive Service and representatives of the Department on State Executive Service.

During the meeting, the Deputy Minister updated the participants on the current state of reform of executive service, including the introduction of the private bailiffs service. According to him, 44 private bailiffs are currently registered and started their work. At the same time, currently a number of restrictions are imposed in regard to them: private bailiffs cannot execute documents over UAH 6 million  during first year of operations and UAH 20 million — during the second year, as well as decisions against state bodies and companies. He also outlined that there are prevention mechanism to avoid involvement of private bailiffs into raiding and other criminal schemes. Also, the Deputy Minister stressed that there is a significant difference between private bailiffs and collectors, as first, unlike the latter, operate in strictly defined legal field. Other current issues, including issues related to execution of judgments, guaranteed by the state, were discussed. According to the speaker, all such decisions are submitted for execution, but their execution depends on sufficient budget funding.

Meeting on anti-raiding issues with Olena Sukmanova and Iaroslav Gregirchak

On  21 September the Chamber held a meeting devoted to counteracting raiding with Olena Sukmanova, Deputy Justice Minister of Ukraine for State Regis­tration and Iaroslav Gregirchak, Deputy Business Ombudsman.

Iaroslav Gregirchak presented recommendations developed by the Business Ombudsman Council which particularly touch upon the activities of the Ministry of Justice. He also stressed that reforms, implemented by the Ministry in past years, already significantly decreased the level of raider attacks and it is important to keep the pace of reforms and the level of dialog.

Olena Sukmanova, in her turn, commented on the possibility of implementing these recommendations in the nearest future. According to her, certain recommendations were already implemented — in particular, those related to publication of names of registrars who were disconnected from the registry, with indication of reasons why they were disconnected.

Meeting with Pavlo Petrenko, Minister of Justice of Ukraine

On 25 September Chamber Members met with Minister of Justice of Ukraine Pavlo Petrenko to discuss current issues that business faces in the context of the Ministry’s activities.

During the meeting, a number of issues related to the rule of law, judicial reform and protection of investors were raised. In particular, Minister highlighted that at the national level there are a number of institutions, such as inter-ministerial commissions on protection of investments and on relations with law-enforcement bodies, exist in order to protect investors. Also work of the appeal commission on state registration along with anti-raiding headquarters of the Ministry of Justice was discussed. In particular, it was stressed that in order to prevent raiding it is important to improve the level of legal literacy of the nation.