The Business Ombudsman has put forward a proposal to clarify the concepts of a "criminal" and an "organized" group.

The initiative of the Commissioner for the Protection of Entrepreneurs' Rights, Kanat Nurov, who proposed enshrining more precise definitions of a "criminal group" and an "organized group" in law, was approved by the Administration of the President of Kazakhstan. Now, during the preparation of new editions of the Criminal and Criminal Procedure Codes, they will be reviewed by the Ministry of Justice.

What is the essence of the issue? According to the Business Ombudsman, business representatives may still be unreasonably held liable under Article 262 of the Criminal Code (organized group, criminal organization) if an economic offense is committed by several persons.

The reason is that the definition of an organized group in subparagraph 36 of Article 3 of the Criminal Code is formulated too vaguely, as a result of which Article 262 often becomes a means of pressure: entrepreneurs are arrested and forced to confess to the main charge.

Earlier, the Ombudsman's position was supported by the Constitutional Court. It was noted that economic violations committed by managers and employees of legal commercial organizations must be separated from the activities of genuine criminal gangs. To implement this recommendation, K. Nurov organized joint work with the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Ministry of Justice, the Prosecutor General's Office, the Agency for Financial Monitoring, and the National Security Committee to clarify the concepts themselves.

It should be noted that Article 31 of the Criminal Code recently introduced a prohibition on considering business structures that were initially created without a criminal purpose as a sign of an organized criminal group (OCG). Nevertheless, entrepreneurs continue to approach the Business Ombudsman — they are prosecuted under Article 262, although the intent to create an OCG is not confirmed by anything.

So the new norm does not resolve the problem. It is tied to the general criminal purpose of an enterprise, rather than to the specific purpose of creating an OCG, and applies to legal entities, not to the individuals who organized such a group.

The growth of such cases is clearly demonstrated by statistics: in the first nine months of 2025, 112 criminal cases were registered under Article 262, 51 percent more than a year earlier (74 cases). Courts convicted 81 people versus 40 in 2024, and seven of them were engaged in entrepreneurial activity (in 2024 there were six such people).

The main problem, according to the Business Ombudsman's assessment, is that the law does not distinguish between ordinary groups of persons, including those acting by prior conspiracy, and especially dangerous criminal groups, which include OCGs (subparagraph 24 of Article 3 of the Criminal Code). The concept of a "criminal group" has no definition of its own and merely lists its types, the first of which is called an "organized group." Subparagraph 36 of the same article describes an organized group rather as a technical term indicating the stability of an association. It turns out that a specific concept includes an abstract one, and this allows any group offense to be interpreted expansively as the activity of an OCG.

In practice, this looks as follows: a crime committed by a "group of persons" is equated with a "criminal group," and then equated with an "organized group," which is defined too broadly as a stable association of two or more persons who have agreed in advance to commit an offense. Thus any group of persons turns into an OCG.

To eliminate this uncertainty, the Business Ombudsman proposes changing the terminology.

First. Replace "criminal group" with "criminal association" and define it as an especially dangerous criminal group that exerts an informal destructive influence on citizens and organizations or possesses other coercive force.

Second. Replace "organized group" with "organized criminal group" and define it as an association of individuals created exclusively for the systematic obtaining of financial and other material benefit through illegal control over criminal, shadow, and other enterprises.

According to the author, these amendments will provide a clear legislative basis, which will enable law enforcement agencies, the Prosecutor General's Office, and the Supreme Court to revise their approaches to qualifying group economic offenses by entrepreneurs as acts of an OCG, and the recommendations of the Constitutional Court will be fully implemented. Subsequently, the Ministry of Justice will consider these proposals when drafting new editions of the Criminal Code and the Criminal Procedure Code.

Yerden OMAR