Journal of Security and Sustainability Issues

Many of us are living in apartment buildings and this form of living is becoming more frequent and popular with urban development. A large number of those living in apartment buildings are also owners of the apartment they live in (or other nonresidential premises in the apartment building). Not only rights, but also certain obligations are associated with the ownership of apartments. One of the legal obligations is to bear the common costs of goods and services, which are being provided to the apartment bulding. In Slovak republic, the division of these costs and the settlement of monthly advance payments is being done on an annual basis. The basis for the division of these costs is the proportionality of the use of the common parts and common facilities of the apartment building, which is expressed in the so called person months (metric unit for settlement). By not reporting the true number of personmonths to the administrator, an owner may gain material benefit (achieve higher overpayments and lower arrears) and this illegal financial benefit needs to be covered and compensated by other owners in the same apartment building. In terms of criminal law, the owner is committing fraud (a related offence to insolvency crimes). The authors analyze the legal aspects related to this criminal offence with relation to case law, legal doctrine, based on the systematical and teleological method of interpretation of relevant legal norms. The article addresses also issues related to the purposefullness of sanctioning of perpetrators, reflecting that the primary purpose of their fraudulent behaviour was enrichment (material gain).

Our paper tackles the issue of the European energy security and economic growth. Specifically, it evaluates the relationship between natural gas consumption and economic growth in the European Union (EU). Channels along which natural gas is supplied to the EU energy markets yield dependence from the Russian Federation which presents a threat to the European energy security. Our sample includes panel time series data over the period from 1997 to 2011 for a 26 EU countries. Based on neoclassical growth model, we create a multivariate model including gross fixed capital formation and total labor forces of a country as additional explanatory variables. Using panel cointegration tests, we found that there exists a long-run relationship between economic growth, natural gas consumption, labor and capital. In the short-run there is bidirectional causality between natural gas consumption and economic growth. The causality running from economic growth to natural gas consumption is positive. On the other hand, the causality, which runs from natural gas consumption to economic growth, is negative.