The Ministry of Justice supported the proposal to introduce turnover fines for data breaches

The Ministry of Justice has prepared a government response to a bill on turnover fines for personal data operators for leaks. The Cabinet of Ministers supports the initiative previously put forward by senators Andrei Turchak and Irina Rukavishnikova and State Duma deputy Alexander Khinshtein, but subject to revision. This is stated in the letter of the Secretary of State – Deputy Minister of Justice Andrey Loginov to the Ministry of Digital Development, the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Economics and the draft of the government’s official response to the bill. According to the materials, the comments of these three ministries were taken into account. Loginov asks the departments to agree on the text by August 18, taking into account the “short deadlines.” At the end of July 2023, the authors of the bill sent it to the Prime Minister of Russia Mikhail Mishustin, wrote RBC.

Disagreements on the bill arose mainly on two issues: whether voluntary payments of operators to citizens whose data was leaked should be counted as a mitigating circumstance, and also what exactly the amount of the fine should be (it is proposed to set it at the level of 0.1-3% of turnover) . The Ministry of Justice believes that the document should provide for the possibility of voluntary compensation by personal data operators for the alleged harm and take this into account as a mitigating circumstance. The ministry also invites the authors of the initiative to further substantiate the proposed amount of fines and differentiate liability for leakage depending on the nature of the offense and the degree of harm. In addition, the Ministry of Justice considers it necessary to distinguish between liability for legal entities and individual entrepreneurs (in order to comply with the Code of Administrative Offenses on taking into account the property status of those held liable).