Vol. 25 No. 4 (2023)

The article discusses the issues of ethics and morals, and regulation mechanisms of public servants’ professional ethics in the Russian Federation on the example of public authorities. The author studied the activities of the Commissions for complying with the requirements to the official behavior of publicservants and settling the conflicts of interests in various publicauthorities.The article concludes that during the last years, in a number of public organizations the Commissions did not convene for meetings due to lack of grounds. Today, we need to develop effective mechanisms to improve the efficiency of professional ethics management in public organizations.The author suggests a set of amendments to the existing legislation,as well as the creation of a body controlling the ethics and official behavior of a public servant. Promotion of ethics in public authorities needs reconsideration and supplementation of the grounds for the Commission’s meetings,introduction of a federal codified act regulating professional ethics and official behavior of publicservants and establishing a specificstructure dealing with professional ethics in public organizations.

The article studies the development of remedial interpretation in Russia. It also assesses whether there are cases in which this instrument has been used in Russian court practice. The study relies on the analysis of judicial practice, academic literature, and regulations, as well as on the comparative legal approach. The article examines existing interpretation methodology of contractual terms in Russian contract law.The author argues that the existing system has a significant conceptual shortcoming: its inabilityto enforce contracts without a literallyexpressed condition in the text.The text defines the general procedure for regulating relations in the absence of an explicit contractual condition - applying mandatory and dispositive rules of law, custom, analogy, and the principles of good faith, reasonableness, and fairness. The article analyzes cases of filling the relevant contractual gaps in Russian judicial practice. The author concludes that, in Russian civil law, there is no institute of «supplementing» contracts like in other legal systems. However, Russian courts still create and include terms in agreements that they think are necessary to achieve the purpose of the contract and reflect the parties' common will.

The article deals with the main problems of state regulation for the rights of minorityparticipants in the corporation to obtain information and documents on the financial and economicactivities of the corporation. It assesses the problems of state regulation and the practice of its application.The methods of research used by the author are comparative-legal,formally-legal,logical,dialectical and systemic.In this article,the author proceeds from the fact that in practice, corporations often, and in the context of a corporate conflict, in the overwhelming majority of cases, regardless of the adopted judicial acts, evade their execution. Minority shareholders cannot obtain the information they need for long periods of time,as a result of which they often do not have time to stop the offenses committed bythe majorityshareholders and prevent significant damage to the corporation. The author concludes that the regulation of corporate relations in terms of the rights of minority shareholders of the corporation to receive information should be strengthened by the state through various measures, including new measures that have no analogues. Such regulation will balance relations within the corporation,reduce the risks of using the corporation solely in the interests of majority participants and,as a result,increase the investment attractiveness of corporations.

The article analyzes the issues of law enforcement practice associated with child-parent relations in light of philosophical views of the American thinker, philosopher, and educator John Dewey.The problem of the correlation between parental authority and children’s freedom is critical in today’s society. Parents, imparting their social experience and engaging the child into the social environment,help their child develop individual mental and emotional principles of behavior and attitudes, which are an indispensable condition for the individual’s existence in a society.That is why the issue of state regulation of family relations concerns many researchers in the sphere of family law.There are numerous problems in determining the scope of rights and obligations of parents and children,in defining the extent of responsibilityfor inappropriate parental behavior, and in establishing the legal position of children. Recent legislative initiatives to reduce the state’s role in regulating legal relations within families have faced severe criticism from the legal community. Namely, initiatives suggested reducing the state’s authorityconcerning familyrelations and expending the parents’and guardians’rights.These changes could have harmed the interests of individual familymembers.The author sees a possible solution to this vicious circle in creating collective understanding,using not the methods of control or coercion but the sphere of collective intelligence based on scientific methods of cognition.

The article explores how notarial actions, specifically conducting an inventory of inherited propertyat the request of heirs,affect the protection of inherited property.The author explores the different aspects of compiling an inventory for the sole heir,focusing on the challenges associated with transferring monetary assets,precious metals and gemstones,and securities that do not require management to a bank for safekeeping.Additionally,the author addresses the procedure for drafting the inventory documents and justifies the necessityof creating multiple copies,emphasizing their practical relevance in seeking protective measures.The article discusses controversial situations arising in the field of inheritance law: bankruptcy of the testator,partial inventory of inheritance,execution of escheat property. The work primarily discusses the private law aspects of regulating the relations developing between participants in civil turnover, providing justification for streamlining the regulation and making these notarial acts available to interested parties upon their request. Recommendations are made to ensure the preservation of movable and immovable inheritance at the state level.

The article presents various ways to develop mono-profile municipalities, using technology to manage effectively and attract investment in developing town-forming enterprises. This includes differentiating the economy for the objects of impact by using control tools. Control technology is a technology for effective management, which ensures achieving the balance of interests for the subjects of the investment process.The author analyzes the effect of control on the investment attractiveness of town-forming enterprises in mono-profile municipalities. The article explains that control tools can make it possible to formalize the activityof the interaction system "monotown -town-forming enterprise".The author proposes ways for improving management by using the model of city-forming enterprises in mono-profile municipalities with investment management based on the control methodology.The author's model "binds" the current monitoring to the results.This allows to assess trends in the investment management system of the enterprise, determine the goals of investment attraction with further detailing, forecast the change of capital investments at the variation of significant factors as well as to determine methods and instruments for solving the problem of ensuring the investment attractiveness of the subject of activity.

The article provides the description and results of applying the method for analyzing the national innovation system of the Russian Federation, which is based on the cognitive connections of institutional participants in the innovation market. The analysis of scenarios made it possible to identify potential points for saving budget funds, provided that the volume of production of innovative products is maintained. The growing complexity of the national innovation system in the Russian Federation requires taking into account not only a large number of system parameters, but the rapidly changing significance of the cognitive connections of participants in the national innovation system (hereinafter referred to as NIS). The NIS cognitive model also made it possible to identify scenario-based measures of government support for the national innovation system. The constructed model potentially requires adjustment of connections since the environment of existence for a real innovation system is dynamic and connections between its institutions can be weakened or strengthened under the influence of external factors.

The article emphasizes the narrow focus of scientific research on factors affecting investment activityin tourism and reveals in detail one of the main factors.Given the authors’desire to comprehensively disclose the importance and content of the studied factor,we should consider that the scientific formation of a set of significant factors responsible for the investment activity,as well as their detailed study,remains out of attention.Nowadays,investment managers have to spend a lot of time and energy to figure out the factors that influence their investment activity. They also need to analyze these factors in relation to the activity area. The authors suggest forming and characterizing a set of the main factors influencing the investment activity in the tourism sector, using the Krasnodar Region as an example.The proposed list of factors is the best possible combination of elements and reflects the content and nature of the influence of each of them.Scientific and practical use of factors in investment activitycan improve the tourism sector and socio-economic achievements of the Krasnodar region.

The Caspian region has long been a crossroads for transport corridors due to its geographic location.After the USSR collapsed,the region experienced dramaticgeopolitical transformations.In the early days of the post-Soviet Caspian-adjacent states, they sought to diversify their routes to external markets and reduce their dependence on transit through Russia and other countries.Border and civil conflicts in the new states of Central Asia and Transcaucasia aggravated their transport isolation, sometimes resulting in transport blockades. At present, attention to the region's transport communications is aggravated by the region's energy resources; the historical competition for regional leadership between such Middle Eastern powers as Iran and Turkey; the growing interests of China,which sees the region as part of the Belt and Road project and has invested significant resources in the region's energy sector; the European Union's desire to establish alternative logistics routes bypassing Russia; Russia's turn to the East and the strategically aggravated need for accelerated expansion of the «North-South» ITCcapacity.Despite all the peculiarities of relations between the Caspian countries, they are all interested in sustainable transport partnership, expressed in the intensification of multivariate logistics development projects, overcoming infrastructure, tariff and non-tariff barriers,as well as the promotion of horizontal links between various levels of publicand private regional structures.An additional incentive for the meridional transport routes development is the increased load on the ports of the Russian Far East basin and reaching the limits of the Eastern polygon of Russian Railways,which will contribute to the redirection of some cargo flows to the “North-South”ITC.

The article provides a comprehensive analysis for the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals bythe G20 countries in the context of strengthening the role of global governance while facing the current global challenges.International political tensions,the economiccrisis following the COVID-19 pandemicand the preceding financial recessions of 2008 and 2015 have shaped a new political reality. In today’s international arena, the competitiveness of states depends on developing human potential by increasing the quality of life through ecologyand safetyof the urban environment,education,and digitalization of the economy.At the same time,strict economic indicators are becoming a second priority.The world community is experiencing a gradual shift of the coordination initiative from supra-regional international organizations towards such actors as the G20 -a less bureaucraticand competitive association with a growing institutional structure.Based on the results of 2022 and the first half of 2023, we can argue that amid political turbulence, such systems provide a stable dialogue between the working groups driving the rapid implementation of SDGs on the states’agendas.

The article reviews the issues of prioritizing directions and forming state policy in the field of social protection for the participants of the special military operation (SMO) and members of their families. The work pays particular attention to measures for implementing the decrees of the President of the Russian Federation regarding the establishment of newbenefits and guarantees of social protection for this category of citizens.The authors reveal the notion of social passports for participants of SMO and consider approaches to forming a unified regional standard of support measures for participants of SMO and their family members.The article considers the advantages of the work on social protection for this category of citizens with the participation of the “Defenders of the Fatherland”Foundation.

The article considers the linguisticpeculiarities of communications in overcoming crisis situations and analyzes how state and large business structures behave during anti-crisis communication events.The author analyzed publications in mass media and found a set of effective manipulation strategies which allowed to overcome a negative attitude of the recipient to an event or phenomenon.The main linguistic manipulation techniques are explained in the anti-crisis PR-response examples. A crisis situation requires the development of a comprehensive crisis management system. Every organization needs to protect its reputation and control information during crises. This is especially important when the organization’s current activities and reputation are being attacked.Also,all business processes need to be protected. The solution to protecting corporate reputation lies in using communication features and language manipulation techniques to form and influence public opinion, which is essential for anti-crisis PR-response.

New reality, given targeted sanctions against Russia, makes it necessary to remove barriers in international trade and economic relations.The sanctions against Russia have accelerated the emergence of new financial systems,an international interbank information transfer system outside the SWIFT system, and the creation of logistics corridors to redirect exports to the South and East.The article analyzes Russia’s trade and economicrelations with Iran and the prospects of creating a payment instrument in foreign trade transactions represented by a cryptocurrency (since Iran is the first country to legalize mining of cryptocurrency). In Iran, digital money mining is a separate legalized industry, and the country uses cryptocurrency as a reserve to pay for imports and exports.The author believes that applying blockchain as a breakthrough technology that can change the economy is reasonable and will likely continue to evolve. In 2022, the number of Western sanctions imposed on Russia exceeded the number of sanctions applied against Iran,given that the Republic of Iran has been under sanctions for nearly44 years and has a practice of foreign trade in cryptocurrencies.The experience of introducing the stablecoin within the foreign trade relations between Russia and Iran can be used in trade and economic relations with other countries. Stablecoins have the potential to enhance the current infrastructure for international trade.

The article investigates the influence of acts of publicauthorities on the fulfillment of obligations under international oil and gas sales contracts. The author considers whether such acts may constitute hardships (force majeure) that can be invoked by contracting parties to exempt themselves from the fulfillment of contractual obligations or contractual liability. The article analyses arbitration and court decisions on disputes arising in this area since the 1970s.The issue became particularly relevant in 2022, when Presidential Decree of March 31,2022,No.172 «On Special Procedure for the Fulfillment by Foreign Buyers of Obligations to Russian Natural Gas Suppliers» was adopted. There is already the first arbitral decision on this issue,which has qualified this act as force majeure.The question of whether acts of public authorities constitute circumstances of force majeure in international oil and gas sales contracts is not unambiguous,as it depends on the circumstances of each specific case.In arbitrations where it was found that government actions about state-owned businesses couldn’t be considered a force majeure, the arbitrators looked at the terms of the contract and the way the risk of unforeseeable events was divided between the contracting parties.