The right to property and the right of trust property (on the way to recodification of the civil legislation of Ukraine)

Abstract

The article examines the socio-economic background of the introduction of trust and other trust-like structures in the legislation of Ukraine. As a result of considering the history of the origin of the institution of trust and a systematic analysis of the provisions of domestic civil legislation, reasoned conclusions were formulated on the issues studied.

The given short historical retrospective of attempts to introduce trust property and trust-like constructions into the legislation of Ukraine allows to state that they almost always led to "unworthy", negative social, financial and economic results. The question of the purpose of ignoring one's own negative experience of implementing trust-like structures in the domestic civil legislation is reasonable. Isn't it better, remembering the functions of the science of civil law, to draw the right conclusions from this experience and rely on them in their further law-making activities?!

The article draws attention to the experience of using the construction of trust and trust property in the Anglo-American legal system (which, unlike ours, is calculated for centuries), and establishes that this legal institution in addition to legitimate purposes (which are charity, preservation of property from waste, formation of pension funds, etc.), is extremely popular as a means of achieving illegal and negative social results (for example, such as tax evasion, abuse of tax rates, concealment of property and income, legalization of property obtained as a result of committing crime, concealment of illegal funding of political parties and their leaders, etc.). It is obvious that the blind borrowing of someone else for the domestic legal system and the archaic institution of trust property will lead to the penetration into our legal reality of all its inherent shortcomings.

Law is a regulator of social relations (and economic in particular). In this case, public relations are primary, and law - secondary. Only those civil law institutions properly perform the regulatory function that determines their existence, which are in demand throughout the history of economic relations and necessary for society as a prerequisite for its normal existence and development. If social relations have not developed, then is there a need to create "artificial" legal institutions or to borrow legal structures generated in the bosom of other legal systems to regulate relations that have developed in the age of feudalism?! These circumstances must be taken into account in any attempts to improve the acts of civil law, and in recodification, including. The question of the sufficiency (or insufficiency) of the socio-economic base for the introduction of the institution of trust in Ukraine should be categorized as rhetorical. Trust construction is just a legal tool. And the result of its application will depend on the quality of regulatory "material" proposed by the legislator (and he, in turn, representatives of the doctrine of civil law), on establishing the place of this legal institution in the civil law system, and creating legal barriers that minimize it use to achieve a socially negative effect.