20 August 2020

The Arbitrary Court of Saint Petersburg and Leningrad Region left without consideration a claim of the bank which in January 2020 had initiated a bankruptcy process of Olga Kargina who used to hold a number of senior posts with the bank including that of non-core assets management department head. According to the bank, the defendant owes it 123.3 million rubles.

According to the case documents, the court based its decision on the fact that the representatives of the bank failed to attend the court sessions on a few occasions. Olga Kargina also told the court that her debt to the bank had been assigned in favor of Mr Evgeny Kozin. Meanwhile, a new creditor also failed to appear in court.

Irina Serova, the head of St Petersburg regional office of Khrenov&Partners, thinks that the situation when the assignee loses interest in bankruptcy is quite weird. ‘It is usually easier for the creditor to gain control of assets belonging to a private person than to those of a legal entity, and normally the initiator of bankruptcy passes all three stages of arbitration’, she says. According to Mrs Serova the situation may be caused by the fact that the debt was bought out from the bank by a person affiliated with the debtor. And the new creditor wants to deflect the debtor from the bank’s pressure and not to recover the debt, the expert adds.

The full article may be viewed here (in Russian).