Juridiskajām personām piemērojamo krimināltiesisko piespiedu ietekmēšanas līdzekļu juridiskā daba

ENThe option of addressing legal persons within the framework of criminal law by means of the application of coercive criminal justice measures has now been in force in Latvia for seven years already. This may be considered a sufficiently long period of time for the assessment of the practical necessity, applicability and viability of these legal provisions. The article analyses common and different features of criminal penalties and coercive criminal justice measures in order to clarify the criminal justice nature of the coercive measures applicable to legal persons, paying special attention to the issue of guilt and possible attribution of the purposes of penalisation to coercive criminal justice measures. Regarding the issue of the establishment of guilt, it has to be concluded that the legislature has substituted the need to establish guilt for the purposes of the application of coercive measures to legal persons with the need to establish criminally penalised actions committed by persons related to the legal person (authorised to represent the legal person, to act on its behalf, to pass decisions on behalf of that legal person or to exercise control upon the legal person) that have been committed in the interests of the particular legal person. Furthermore, with regard to the purposes of the criminal penalty and coercive measures applicable to legal persons, it can be concluded in relation to the latter that the purposes characteristic to criminal penalties are achieved only in cases where the criminal offence in the interests of the legal person has been committed by persons who directly benefit from the business of the legal person, whereby it may be assumed pursuant to the body of provisions of Chapter VIII of the Criminal Law and through analysis of the conditions of the application thereof that in all other cases one of the main aims of the abovementioned coercive measures is the seizure of illegal proceeds.The summary of the assumed considerations regarding the similar and diverse features of the criminal penalty and coercive measures applicable to legal persons allows for the conclusion to be made that the most essential difference in the application of both forms of these measures is specifically due to the issue of establishing guilt, which in relation to legal persons has been substituted by the establishment of a criminally penalised action committed in the interests of the legal person by a natural person (representative of the legal person). If in fact, the Latvian legislature has not included these coercive measures applicable to legal persons in the system of criminal penalties stipulated by the Criminal Law, but rather created a group of compulsory measures that exists in parallel to the system of criminal penalties in addition to the other already existing compulsory measures that are not criminal penalties (compulsory measures of a medical nature, compulsory measures of a correctional nature). Such a solution is indeed to be considered as that which is most suitable for the Latvian doctrine of criminal law; although at the same time, it is rather close to the determination of the criminal liability of legal persons, except for the differences in terminology.