The Pepeliaev Group's St. Petersburg office has successfully represented Korean energy holding company Daesung Industrial Co., Ltd. in its claim for USD 4 million from its Russian counterpart.
According to the Pepeliaev Group, "our client was seeking to recover from its Russian contracting party a four-million dollar debt under agreements for the sale and purchase of products manufactured in Korea. The project continued for more than one year. Our lawyers succeeded in winning the dispute despite the scant and sometimes directly contradictory evidentiary base. The primary difficulty was that there was no single document that amounted to a written sale and purchase (or supply) agreement between the parties. Instead, only e-mail correspondence between representatives of the claimant and the defendant was available. Further, the products from Korea were not shipped directly to the claimant, but they were sent to addresses of third parties which the defendant specified in its e-mail requests. The defendant had no formal connection with the recipients of the products.
Nevertheless, the Pepeliaev Group’s lawyers succeeded in persuading the court that the parties had entered into one-time sale and purchase agreements by exchanging correspondence by e-mail. As a result, the State Commercial Court of St Petersburg and Leningrad Region upheld the client's claim in full."
“Currently, an ever increasing number of fraudulent schemes are being used when goods are supplied," commented Sergey Spasennov, Partner at the Pepeliaev Group. "A particularly popular one involves the scammers asking for goods to be shipped to third parties without executing a contract or after a contract has been executed featuring a front company. The instructions to this effect come from a private e-mail box or by telephone. Subsequently, in court, it will be very difficult to prove that a legal relationship between the parties really existed. However, we succeeded in having several such cases resolved in favor of our clients, which were good-faith businesses.”
The Pepeliaev Group’s team included Partner Sergey Spasennov and Associate Alexandra Antonik, with assistance from the head of the firm's Korean Desk, Cheong Noh-Chung.
