The Ministry of Justice, as part of the Working Group on the analysis of important safety and consumer and state interests in the economic and financial sphere, set up at the initiative of the Prime Minister at the Office for Competition and Consumer Protection, undertook work on changes to the penal code. The changes are intended to concern a separate offence, which is the so-called creation of financial pyramids.
The financial pyramid is an activity in which the profit of a particular participant is directly dependent on contributions from later participants, which are as if below this structure. The need to attract new participants means that the financial pyramid is doomed in advance.
The financial pyramid is characterized by: offering high profits, misleading customers, recruiting new customers until the company goes bankrupt. one of the first financial pyramids in Poland was the Safe Savings Fund founded In 1989, and recently the most famous financial pyramid was the Amber Gold Sp. z o.o. pyramid.
Today, their creators can be responsible for creating financial pyramids on the basis of, among others, Article 286(1). Act dated 6 June 1997 Criminal Code (Journal of Laws of 1997, item 553), which concerns the adverse disposition of property.
In order to hold anyone accountable on the basis of the above - mentioned article, victims who have suffered losses due to unfair practices must appear. He's threatening to do as much as eight years of imprisonment.
According to the Ministry of Justice press office, analytical work is underway on the changes to the penal code. The National Prosecutor's Office is also to help in the work.
The Ministry of Justice informs that the work carried out is aimed at introducing appropriate provisions into the Polish legal order, which will enable effective combating of companies with such a "business model", i.e.
the creation of regulations allowing for the initiation of proceedings already at the time of suspicion of building a financial pyramid. These provisions will be independent of the already present in the Polish law of "unfavourable disposition of property".
Author:
Paweł Boś
Author of numerous articles on legal and tax matters, published in the industry press. Related to Russell Bedford Poland 2018. Law student at Leon Kozmiński Academy in Warsaw and graduate of Management at Świętokrzyska University of Technology.