Igor Krasnov, Russia’s prosecutor general, says new legal steps are being made to put crypto under check, saying cryptocurrencies are being used for bribery and corruption.
According to a senior official, Russian lawmakers are working on new legislation that would allow the government to seize cryptocurrency.
According to local news agency TASS, Russian Prosecutor General Igor Krasnov indicated that the government is currently working on a set of revisions to the country’s criminal code that will allow authorities to recover crypto earned from illegal activities.
On Wednesday, Krasnov said that cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin (BTC) are increasingly being used for corruption and bribery during a convention of European prosecutor offices. According to the official, bitcoin can also be used to launder embezzled government funds.
“The criminal usage of cryptocurrencies poses a serious challenge in our country,” Krasnov added. He said that Russia’s recently enacted crypto law “On Digital Financial Assets” (DFA) had played a critical part in addressing the issue, but that upcoming criminal code revisions will provide even more protection.
According to Krasnov, this would allow for the implementation of restrictive measures and the expropriation of virtual assets.
According to some local business experts, no amount of regulation will allow the government to take cryptocurrency holdings.
Nikita Soshnikov, a former senior lawyer at Deloitte CIS and the director of Alfacash, told Cointelegraph that “digital assets maintained in wallets would be impossible to confiscate like any other type of asset.”
“However, there has already been one landmark case in which FSB officers were found guilty of receiving bribes and the court formally seized 0.1 and 4.70235 BTC as state revenue,” he pointed out.
According to Soshnikov, Russia began developing plans for crypto confiscation in 2019, years before the DFA law was passed.
“The Prosecutor General’s Office remains the project’s most important stakeholder, and the current declaration is merely a confirmation of previously established plans,” he added.
Krasnov, who was a deputy head of Russia’s investigating committee before becoming prosecutor general in early 2020, was formerly a deputy chairman of the country’s investigation committee.
Krasnov has been a prominent opponent of cryptocurrency since his tenure. He said last year that crypto is regularly used to facilitate criminality in Russia, and that it has increased 25-fold since 2015.
Krasnov stated in October that Russian civil officials would be compelled to register crypto holdings on the same basis as regular assets.
Krasnov’s increased efforts to combat crypto-enabled corruption in Russia came months after his prosecution of the Russian opposition and anti-corruption activist Alexei Navalny was sanctioned by US President Joe Biden’s administration.
