Guilty without a saw – Newspaper Kommersant No. 134 (7096) of 07/31/2021

by time news

The Ministry of Natural Resources has prepared new articles of the Administrative Code on fines and confiscation for the owners of the equipment used by criminal loggers. As the department explains, now, even when illegal loggers are detained, the timber trucks and the cranes they use turn out to be the property of third parties and are returned to the owners in order to find themselves in the black clearings again. The agency proposes to fine companies that provide illegal logging with equipment by 500-700 thousand rubles, and confiscate the machines themselves – this rule already works in violation of a number of provisions of customs legislation.

The Ministry of Natural Resources has prepared a draft amendment to the Administrative Code on fines and confiscation for owners of logging equipment in cases of their participation in illegal logging. Explaining the need to expand the fight against illegal industrial logging, in the explanatory note to the document on regulation.gov.ru, the ministry directly says that with tens of thousands of persons fined in the Russian Federation for criminal logging (18.5 thousand people and 146 million rubles fines in 2015–2019, 66.2 thousand materials under Article 260 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation), the average amount of damage in such cases is steadily growing.

«Thus, the average amount of harm caused by one fact of illegal logging amounted to: in 2015 – 510 thousand rubles; in 2016 – 666 thousand rubles; in 2017 – 667 thousand rubles; in 2018 – 758 thousand rubles; in 2019 – 846 thousand rubles. “, – note the authors of the bill.

The Ministry of Natural Resources explains this by an increase in the productivity of equipment: it “allows illegal felling in the amount of 50 cubic meters within an hour. m, which is enough for harvesting more than 25 cubic meters. m of high-quality timber (the average volume of timber taken out of the forest per trip by a timber truck). The harm caused to forests and the natural objects located in them by such illegal logging amounts to hundreds of thousands of rubles. “

At the same time, black loggers themselves, as a rule, do not own tractors, skidders, tractors and cranes: they usually belong to “third parties who themselves are not directly involved in the commission of these offenses, but provide their property to persons engaged in illegal felling,” writes the Ministry of Natural Resources … As a result, when the violators are detained, including at the scene of the offense, “the logging equipment seized as an instrument of committing an administrative offense is returned to its copyright holder,” who does not bear the risk of prosecution and loss of equipment – and therefore can “an unlimited number of times” supply them with cutters and receive a share of the income.

“Prevention of illegal logging … seems impossible without creating legal conditions for the elimination of the material and technical base”, explaining the need to introduce a new Article 8.282 in the Code of Administrative Offenses with a sanction in the form of “an administrative fine with confiscation of logging equipment for violating the ban on staying in forests with logging equipment, if there are no legal grounds for the felling of forest plantations provided for by the Forest Code “- as well as” for the deliberate provision of the specified property by the copyright holders to other persons “for purposes not related to legal work in the forest. In another new article of the Code of Administrative Offenses, the department defines “the provision of logging equipment to other persons”, which means the transfer by the copyright holder of the specified property to the possession, use of persons who have no grounds for harvesting wood. A ban on the provision of logging equipment by copyright holders to other persons for purposes not related to legal work was proposed to be introduced into Art. 231 of the Forest Code.

The sanctions proposed by the Ministry of Natural Resources for supplying black loggers with machinery are 30-50 thousand rubles. for officials and 500-700 thousand rubles. for companies.

At the same time, the norm will not affect individuals – they “do not fall under the sanction of the projected Code of Administrative Offenses, since they are not loggers in the literal sense of the word.” At the same time, the ministry notes that the practice of confiscating the instruments of committing administrative offenses is already being applied in the field of violation of customs rules.

“Most likely, a fine in this amount can be viewed as an effective measure. The main obstacle is to exclude the possibility of corruption cases during its implementation, ”says Marina Zotova, WhatWood analyst. She believes that the owners of large parks of forestry equipment are not threatened by the idea of ​​the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment – they cannot but have an idea of ​​how it is used by a chain of tenants and subleasers. “They are not responsible for their actions, but the choice of the counterparty is in the sphere of responsibility of the other party. Moreover, large companies have long had the technical and technological ability to remotely control all their equipment in real time: where and how it is operated. Affordable and inexpensive solutions have been introduced for a long time, ”the expert says.

However, these fines and confiscations will not solve all the problems of black logging and these fines and confiscations: the Kommersant correspondent had a chance to observe how completely legal lumberjacks, leaving a legally cut area, cut down and take out all marketable timber on the way to it – forest protection and the prosecutor’s office simply did not register this have time.

Oleg Sapozhkov, Olga Mordyushenko

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