The Odessa Economic Court held a regular meeting to consider the claim of the military prosecutor's office against Basko LLC for the recovery of a property complex that 20 years ago belonged to the Ministry of Defense.
Let us briefly remind you that this object, located on the street. Promyshlennaya 37, in Odessa, at the end of 2004, was legally and transparently, at market value, sold by the Ministry of Defense to the limited liability company “Basko”. Then, in 2008, part of the property came into the possession of the Atlant private enterprise.
The prosecutor's claim groundlessly alleged that the property of the Ministry of Defense, during the war, became the property of a citizen of the Russian Federation.
It was with the refutation of this fact that the trial began. The defendant's lawyer provided the court with extracts from the State Register indicating that the beneficiary of the Atlant private enterprise is a citizen of the United States of America, and not the Russian Federation.
“Did the prosecutor understand that, during the war, he filed a lawsuit, manipulatively referring to the fact that the land of the Ministry of Defense became the property of the Russian Federation, and it was under this pretext that he offered to take back the property purchased 20 years ago, and by a completely different enterprise? “, noted lawyer of Basko LLC Yana Sribnaya.
This question remained unanswered.
However, the court rejected the submitted documents due to formal circumstances, which it promised to refer to in the text of the court decision.
Strange order
The prosecutor of the Specialized Prosecutor's Office for the Defense of the Southern Region, Viktor Bogatyr, in turn, tried to prove that the head of the Central Directorate of the Ministry of Defense, Dmitry Isaenko, did not have the right to grant permission to the director of the state enterprise Yuzhvoenstroy to sell the facility. According to the military prosecutor, the power of attorney to sign such documents was revoked by order of the Minister of Defense.
However, since the available documents convincingly prove that the power of attorney was valid both at the time of the sale and for another year and a half after the transaction, until April 2006, the lawyers baffled the plaintiffs with awkward questions.
It turned out that the prosecutor did not know that there were simply no legal grounds for revoking a power of attorney by “orders” without the corresponding registration notarial actions. According to the Law, a notarized power of attorney can only be revoked by contacting a notary.
“In addition, Article 249 of the Civil Code states that a person who has issued a power of attorney and then revoked it is obliged to immediately notify the person to whom the power of attorney was previously issued. If this has not been done, then the person has the right to continue to exercise representation,” stressed Yana Sribnaya. “Neither the Minister of Defense nor any other official has the authority by law to invalidate a notarized power of attorney on the basis of his order.”
And the Ministry of Defense turned to the notary to cancel the power of attorney only on April 1, 2006, a year and a half after the sale of the property!
At the meeting, it was also noted that the prosecutor’s office became interested in this issue only in 2019: then the department had already tried to sue, but the Supreme Court denied the prosecutor the right to protect the interests of the Ministry of Defense.
In this regard, Judge Sergei Gut asked the plaintiff whether he knew about the decisions of the Economic Court in similar cases related to the property of Yuzhgorstroy.
The fact is that in 2019, the prosecutor’s office filed about three dozen similar lawsuits relating to other facilities that belonged to Yuzhgorstroy and were also no longer the property of the Ministry of Defense. And all these claims were rejected, since the statute of limitations for such cases had already passed.
“We don’t have the information”….
Therefore, the defendant’s lawyers destroyed the evidence voiced in the prosecutor’s office’s lawsuit that the Atlant private enterprise, which bought this property complex in 2008, is an unscrupulous purchaser. When asked directly whether the department had evidence for its allegations, the prosecutor was forced to answer in the negative; therefore, he deliberately cited false facts when filing his claim.
The main question remained without an answer from the representative of the Ministry of Defense who was present at the meeting. Why didn’t the Ministry of Defense try to return the property complex for two decades, and this issue arose only now, and only on the initiative of the prosecutor’s office?
It seemed that the prosecutor’s office did not “bother” at all when filing the claim and did not even try to rely on the facts. For example, during the trial, the Basco lawyer surprised the plaintiffs with the information that the State Enterprise Yuzhvoenstroy had annually, since 2005, provided the Ministry of Defense with reports with a list of property owned by the enterprise. And in this list there has been no object on the street for two decades. Industrial, which means the Ministry of Defense, was well informed about this fact, agreed with it, and did not try to appeal the deal in court.
Moreover, the State Property Fund also officially confirmed that already in 2006 this object was not on the list of property of the Ministry.
The plaintiff’s side was unable to provide any explanations for all these facts, citing a lack of information. The next hearing is scheduled for February 22 – and given all the circumstances of the case, there is hope that the court will make a decision very quickly.
