What Article 179¹ is about
The market in precious metals and precious stones rests on the result of a test: a buyer trusts the report drawn up by an accredited testing laboratory, and the certificate issued on the strength of it. Article 179¹ of the Code of Administrative Offences penalises the abuse of exactly that trust — falsification of a test report by a testing laboratory (centre) accredited in the field of certification.
The text of the article attributes the act to the laboratory (centre) itself, and another market participant who relies on a falsified report is not its direct addressee. The article does not, however, set out how liability is divided between the organisation and any particular member of its staff; that cannot be read out of the text and has to be settled from the case file.
Note how narrowly the article defines who it is addressed to: it speaks of a testing laboratory (centre) accredited in the field of certification. That is a qualifying feature rather than description, so one thing worth checking is whether the organisation held precisely that accreditation when the disputed report was drawn up.
Report, certificate and assay
Three ideas need to be kept apart. The test report is the document in which the laboratory records the result. The certificate is issued for particular goods. The assay is the indicator that, in the case of precious metals, the falsified report is meant to falsify.
The sanction rests on all three links: the report is falsified, a certificate was issued for identified goods, and the sum paid for those goods becomes the basis on which the fine is calculated. If any one link is not established, the chain that produces the figure breaks — which is why each of the three is examined separately.
Two separate compositions
The article covers two distinct situations, each with its own sanction. What separates them is what the falsified report was meant to achieve.
- falsifying the report in order to falsify the assay of precious metals — a fine of ten times the sum paid for the goods for which the certificate was issued;
- falsifying the report in order to falsify precious stones — a fine of three times that same sum.
In neither case is the fine a fixed amount: it is calculated from the sum paid for the goods for which the certificate was issued. That sum is the central figure in the case, and usually the main thing the parties argue about.