July 25 Main results of the day

The Moscow City Court upheld the appeals of Alexander Pogodin and Lilia Sokirinskaya, lawyers of the Bureau of Lawyers De jure, and commuted the Defendant’s sentence to three years in prison. Within the framework of this criminal case, the Defendant was accused of committing a crime under the fourth part of Article 159 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. This applies to serious crimes, the sentence for which is up to 10 years in prison. The task of the lawyers of the Bureau, who accepted the defense at the appeal stage, was to mitigate the already severe sentence by proving circumstances that were not taken into account by the court of first instance mitigating the punishment. This task was completed in full. In the court of appeal, the measure of criminal punishment was reduced to 3 years of imprisonment.

The Moscow City Arbitration Court fully satisfied the Principal’s claim to exclude the procedural opponent from the membership of the Company and recover from him and the firms controlled by him losses totaling more than 43 million rubles. Disputes about the exclusion of a member from the Company are extremely complex, since such a measure of responsibility is extraordinary and is applied in exceptional cases. Lawyers of the Bureau of Lawyers “De jure” managed to substantiate the existence of objective grounds for the application of such a measure of responsibility, proving numerous facts of abuse by the Defendant committed by him during the period of his duties as the sole executive body of the Company. The court also took into account the Bureau’s arguments that the consequences of the Defendant’s illegal actions cannot be eliminated without depriving the offender of the opportunity to participate in the management of the company, and the Defendant’s personality can be associated with criminal and immoral activities by a wide range of people. In addition, the very procedural behavior of the Defendant, numerous facts of abuse of the right on his part clearly indicate the intention to harm the interests of the Society itself and other participants. An important issue in the dispute was the issue of missing the limitation period for the Plaintiff’s appeal to the court. But here, too, the representatives of the procedural opponent suffered a crushing defeat. Lawyers of the Bureau of Lawyers “De jure” were able not only to justify the absence of a missed limitation period, but also the very impossibility of its application, since the Defendant’s abuse of his right is the basis for refusing to protect his right even if the limitation period had expired. The interests of the Principal, who is a member of the Company, and the Company itself, were represented by Rashid Gitinov, head of corporate dispute resolution practice at the Bureau of Lawyers “De jure”, and Semyon Garayan, lawyer of the Bureau. Nikolai Polusitov, senior lawyer of the Bureau’s Tyumen branch, also took part in the preparation of the legal position.