The federal law is aimed at making corruption prevention more effective. In his annual address to the Federal Assembly of November 30, 2010, Mr Medvedev noted the need to amend the criminal law by introducing a wider range of effective penalties to help combat corruption: “Experience shows that even the threat of up to 12 years’ imprisonment does not stop people from taking bribes. In some cases, economic penalties in the form of fines could have more of a dissuasive effect.”
The amendments to the Russian Federation Criminal Code introduce as an alternative penalty for giving or taking commercial or other bribes fines in multiples of the bribe’s amount. The fines will depend on the gravity of offence and range from ten-fold to 100-fold multiples of the bribe in question, but cannot be lower than 25,000 rubles or higher than 500 million rubles.
The amendments also introduce regulations for legal assistance on cases involving administrative violations in circumstances when procedural action needs to be taken on a foreign territory.