Development of Legislation on Conflict of Interest in Russia: Constitutional and Legal Aspect

systemic attempts to regulate conflicts of interest in the civil service have a relatively recent history both in the North Atlantic (primarily European) tradition and in Russia. Moreover, it is important to note that an important role in the systematization of international approaches (which in many cases went ahead of national approaches) had a significant impact on the general architecture of state regulation in national systems around the world. However, it is safe to say that the specifics of national approaches to regulating conflicts of interest coincide with the specifics and differences of regulation in the Anglo-Saxon and Romano-Germanic legal families. If the former is characterized by an orientation towards flexible tools for ethical regulation through the adoption of codes of conduct (and similar acts) with a serious influence of public and departmental control, then the latter In Russia, the regulation of conflicts of interest at the constitutional and legal level is not directly spelled out - the Constitution of the Russian Federation assigns to the jurisdiction of the Russian Federation the powers to regulate the federal public service (Article 71), in the development of which the federal law "On the State Civil Service of the Russian Federation" dated 27.07. 2004 №79-FZ, which spelled out regulation aimed at preventing conflicts of interest in the civil service. It is important to note that the Russian national regulation of conflict of interests has not completed its organic development and has not formed a system close to one of the two basic “legal families” - in the aggregate of Russian regulatory legal acts, there is a mix of tools aimed at preventing conflicts of interest. At the same time, one cannot fail to note an extremely important trend - the impulse set by the amendments to the Constitution of the Russian Federation in 2021 to suppress the practice of owning persons holding government positions (and, as the federal laws adopted in the development of these amendments show), foreign assets, led to the formation of a new main areas of conflict of interest regulation, which, in terms of the complexity of its toolkit, is almost more elaborate than the toolkit for countering conflicts of interest on the internal, national contour of the civil service. At the same time, there is currently an alarming trend towards the development of so-called "departmental lobbying", which has received special development in the last decade - the practice of quantitative analysis of the volume of adopted legislative initiatives, as well as expert assessments on the influence of the executive authorities on the legislative process indicate that two stable trends have found their realization: the first trend is towards the dominance of the Government of the Russian Federation in the legislative process, within which the volume of adopted legislative initiatives introduced by the Government exceeds the number of adopted initiatives of all other subjects combined, the second trend is the emergence of "departmental lobbyists" among federal parliamentarians , which leads to an even greater increase in the influence of the executive branch and, ultimately, creates risks of imbalance in the branches of government within the framework of the constitutional and legal structure. In this work, an attempt will be made to reveal the constitutional and legal aspect of regulating the conflict of interest in the Russian Federation. The purpose of this work is to form a constitutional, federal and regional toolkit for regulating conflicts of interest.