Corporate security: modern challenges and threats for businesses

The "Corporate security: modern challenges and threats for businesses" Conference was held in Kiev on October 26.

After the opening remarks by Rustam Kolesnik, editor-in-chief of Yuridicheskaya Practika Weekly, together with Sergey Pogrebnoy, chairman of the Board of NGO Association of Corporate Security Professionals of Ukraine, partner of Sayenko Kharenko, Mr. Pogrebnoy provided an overview of the various corporate raiding periods in Ukraine. According to him, the first period (1991 – 1997) was titled “gangsterism”, the second period (2000-2007) was a time of intellectual corporate raiding, the third one (2010-2013) is known as “governmental-criminal” and the last period, from 2014-2016, can be described as boundless raiding. The speaker outlined that business owners don`t pay much attention to business protection until they are face to face with seizing by raiders seizure. Describing methods of protection, Mr.Pogrebnoy stopped at an alarm package, corporate structure protection, constant work with shareholders, monitoring of the external information field, while operational protection should include the regular monitoring of the state registry.

Pavel Moroz, Deputy Minister of Justice, reminded the audience about the two acts of real estate registration that were accepted at the end of last year. The speaker noted that prior to the changes only courts could restore violated rights and this sometimes took more than 6 months. The Ministry of Justice recently developed a new Anti-raider Act aimed at plugging gaps used by raiders. Mr. Pogrebnoy, for his part, added that there are currently around corporate raiding schemes.

Alexey Yankovski, president of the Kiev branch of ISACA International Association, gave practical examples of hacking information systems and described methods for countering it on the example of the situation that took place in a Bangladeshi bank from which significant funds were stolen.

Ruslan Cherniy, chief editor of FinClub, touching upon the topic of information wars, stressed  that the general method for this purpose is disclosure of truthful information.

Alina Plyushch, counsel at Sayenko Kharenko, analyzed the current issue of privacy due to the global trend of business beneficial owners disclosure. Ms. Plyushch described the international standard of automatic exchange of tax information (CRS) where the first exchange will take place in 2018.

Roman Molchenko, head of the technical information protection department at Digital & Analog Systems and Vitaliy Yakushev and director at BiznesBezpekaInform, presented information on how to avoid becoming the victim of technical intelligence. According to the speakers, data protection should not be more expensive than the information itself.

Dmitry Chernyi, head of the economic security department at the National Police of Ukraine, described the main points of raiding schemes. The speaker focused on the latest trends in business raiding, interference in bankruptcy proceedings, changes in registers and use of law-enforcement authorities in “private” interests.

Svetlana Renkas, head of the legal department at Arricano Real Estate Plc and Ivan Gerasimovich, director of risk and safety department at PJSC Smart-Holding, presented ways to fight raiding on the basis of examples of their companies.

During the last session the speakers discussed the problems as well as ways of fighting raiding in the ATO zone.