ARMA specialists should be involved in criminal proceedings for effective work – acting ARMA head
KYIV. March 12 (Interfax-Ukraine) – The Asset Recovery and Management Agency of Ukraine (ARMA) advocates the involvement of its specialists in the investigation of criminal proceedings.
As acting Head of ARMA Vitaliy Syhydyn said at a press conference at Interfax-Ukraine on Friday, the agency's functions and powers require legislative regulation.
So, according to him, a planning procedure should be introduced before the seizure of assets.
"This is the inclusion of ARMA as a potential participant in criminal proceedings... ARMA, using the function of tracing and identifying assets, could help find a much larger number of assets that can be seized," he said.
In the future, Syhydyn said, when attracting ARMA specialists to the group of prosecutors who are investigating criminal proceedings, it would be possible to correctly work out a petition for court to further manage the seized assets.
He also drew attention to the need to unblock the asset sale procedure and streamline the selection of managers for crisis assets.
"Another of our functions is keeping a register of seized assets. Despite the fact that almost all spending on the register in the previous year were essentially reduced, we were able to do a lot, and work on the register was carried out by our forces. Hope that this year, if we have proper funding, we will fully launch the register, integrate it with other registers and databases," Syhydyn said.
Speaking about the achievements in the work of ARMA in the past year, the acting head of the agency announced the provision of a transparent asset management policy.
"Tenders for asset management businesses have become public, and information about active asset managers has become completely open," he said.
According to Syhydyn, ARMA provided the highest budget receipts, despite the lack of funding for the development of the agency.
"The management activities of the business last year made it possible to significantly increase net receipts. And we see this trend now. In 2020, we transferred more than UAH 15 million to the budget, and in the first two months of this year, 40% of the 2020 budget receipts were provided," the acting head of ARMA said.
