New law criminilizes smuggling to match EU requirements
President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelenskyi on Dec 28 signed a new law which would provide criminal liability for cross-border smuggling.
According to the website of the Verkhovna Rada, the signed law concerns the criminalization of smuggling of goods and excise goods and false declaration of goods.
The law provides for a gradient of severity dependity on the value of the goods being smuggled, but at the upper end, smuggling over 2.271 million hryvnias in goods ($59,638) would be punished with a 1.275 million hryvnias ($33,482) fine.
People's deputy Yaroslav Zheleznyak from the political party Golos noted that the adoption of this draft law is a requirement from the EU for Ukraine to receive macro-financial assistance of 1.5 billion euros. He also noted that some of the requirements of the law were altered with input from the business community, including increasing the threshold for when criminal liability is introduced.
On December 7, the Ukrainian business community appealed to the Verkhovna Rada with a request to send the draft law on the criminalization of smuggling for finalization before its adoption in the second reading.
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