THE SOCIAL BASIS OF CRIMINAL LAW PROTECTION OF BANKING IN UKRAINE

The banking system is an important component of the system of finance and credit; its purpose is ensuring the stability of the pricing policy and organizing the functioning of a country's payment system. One of the important conditions for the efficient functioning of banking institutions is their protection against criminal infringements. The analysis of contemporary Ukrainian criminal legislation shows that it lacks the institute of criminal law protection of banking activities. The country's economic changes act as a background for new violations in the sphere of banking which require due criminal law regulation. The authors use previous research of key criminalization factors to examine both general and banking-specific factors that determine the necessity for the criminal law protection in this sphere. They draw special attention to the importance of public danger of an action as one of the critical components for determining the necessity of its criminalization. The authors prove the urgency of the problem which recently attracted attention of both lawmakers and professionals of this sphere. They show the necessity of raising the level of banking security and of building people's confidence in the banking system by ensuring its stability through criminal law measures, among other things. Some select statistical data are used to present indices characterizing banking crimes. The authors note that, in some cases, data are unreliable due to the latent character of these crimes caused by bank employees' abuse of their positions. They also believe that it is not advisable to decriminalize such actions in the sphere of banking that are actively manifested in the present conditions of the state's functioning. Some attention is also paid to the clauses form the adjacent branches of law regulating banking security. The authors conclude that the inclusion of new offences from the sphere of banking into the criminal sphere will improve the potential of criminal legislation as an instrument of fighting crime.