Chief of the Russian Supreme Arbitration Court Anton Ivanov ruled in favor of private companies in privatization cases.
Photo: Dmitry Lekay
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Court Supports Privatization
The presidium of the Supreme Court of Arbitration has simultaneously refused to hear three cases in which the government has challenged the results of privatization and other business deals of the 1990s. Two of the cases were filed by Rosimushchestvo, the Federal Agency for Federal Property Management, concerning the privatization of Domodedovo Airport and OAO Transammiak in the 1990s. The other case was filed by the Finance Ministry and concerned credits granted by the state to agricultural enterprises in 1998.
The four-year saga of the attempted nationalization of Domodedovo Airport is over. The airport is owned by affiliates of the East Line group, which belongs, according to unofficial information, to businessman Dmitry Kamenshchik. That company appealed a Moscow District Court decision that it had to be returned to the state and won. Rosimushchestvo’s appeal of that decision has been turned down. East Line acquired the airport in 1997 and has spent over $1 billion modernizing it since then. The judges ruled that East Line had thereby created a new object, and Rosimushchestvo had waited too long to make its claims.
Togliattiazot received 51 percent of the shares in Transammiak in exchange for transferring 6.1 percent of its own stock to the Samara Property Fund in 1996. Transammiak owns a 2500-km. ammonia pipeline, the only one of its kind in Russia. Togliattiazot transferred its Transammiak stock to another company in 2000. Rosimushchestvo successfully disputed that deal in regional courts, but its suit was rejected by the Supreme Court of Arbitration yesterday.
In the case of the Lot farmers’ enterprise, which received a loan of 200,000 rubles in state money in 1998, the Finance Ministry and Vneshekonombank tried to convince the Supreme Court of Arbitration in 2006 to allow them to collect debts with no statute of limitation. The court ruled that year that there is a three-year limit for filing suit in cases of that type. Then a waiver of that ruling was written into the law “On the Federal Budget for 2007,” and the Finance Ministry attempted to have that clause applied retroactively.
Experts hope the court’s rulings will mark the end of the government’s attempts to review the results of business dealings from the previous decade.
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All the Article in Russian as of Oct. 01, 2008
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