Research On The Issue Subject Of The Crime Of Organizating And Leading Pyramid Selling Activities

The pyramid schemes are more rampant, so the "Criminal Law Amendment (seven)" published in February 2009 brings the activities of organizing and leading pyramid selling into the line of criminal regulation, providing legal basis for combating such activities for judicial authority. This is a great progress in criminal legislative course of combating pyramid schemes. Because of short time of the new law, it is vague in criminal subject, so there are some difficulties in judicial practice. Therefore, from theory and practice, the author gives primary study to the criminal subject of sell movable offence, in the hope of benefiting theory and practice in such illegal activities.Apart from introduction and conclusion, this thesis is divided into four parts.The first part describes how to define the organizer and leader of the pyramid scheme crime. This thesis argues how to identify organizers and leaders in practice by real cases. The author thinks that organizers organize the pyramid selling activities with direct intention subjectively, who hold hopeful and positive attitude to the result of such activities and set up MLM organization under such intention and that organizers organize selling activities from scratch objectively, that is advocating, initiating, planning, and establishing. Organizers include only partners and shareholders, giving limit interpretation to the organizing activities which is induced as leadership activities.The second part describes how to define leader of the pyramid scheme crime. This thesis argues how to identify leaders in practice by real cases. The author, after describing several different views on the leadership in the field of penal law, argues that it is not allowed to define leaders of pyramid selling just according to single one-sided name or the level in direct sales leader, but according to subjective intention and objective position and role. It is thought that people should judge leader by the agreement of the subjective and objective.The third part mainly discusses the issue of identifying active participants. Apart from organizers, leader in the highest-level is an undoubted leader of such crimes. But some lower leaders and participants are victims at first, then victimizers, and active participants also have some leadership activities. Thus it can be seen that there are some kind of links between leaders and active participants, even sometimes overlapped, so it is hard to tell organizers from active participants. The author tells leaders from active participants in terms of subjective mind and objective activities. Against the view of bring active participants into the subject field in penal law researching, the author states reasons for not bringing active participants into subject of such crimes from fours aspects:the MLM business regulation, China's situation, subjective vicious and harmful behavior, suiting punishment to crime and policy of severity and leniency.The forth part is about whether unit should be included into the subject of crime. First, the author describes and analyses different views of penal law in academia on whether put unit into the subject and states its practical needs and puts out that it is keeping with basic spirit of criminal regulations. Second, the author thinks that it should satisfy the following four conditions to identify unit as subject:a unit established by law, criminal behavior is dominated by the will of implementation unit, in the name of unit and the benefits are to unit. Finally, individuals and units are described respectively as organization and leadership activities of the main pyramid of four cases.