Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner has successfully defended United Aircraft Corporation’s subsidiary Irkut and its employees in a criminal case in connection with customs duty evasion amounting to more than RUB 50 million.
According to BCLP, public authorities claimed that UAC deliberately underreported the value of the imported goods, which allegedly resulted in non-payment of customs duties to the Federal budget.
"The defense was able to achieve the withdrawal of the criminal case and the transfer of further investigations to the Ministry of Internal Affairs' preliminary investigation bodies," BCLP announced. "Moreover, the termination of this criminal case due to the absence of corpus delicti prevented the customs authorities to initiate new criminal cases ... for similar claims for an amount exceeding RUB 400 million." According to the firm, the criminal case against two employees of the company was terminated, on exonerating grounds, due to the lack of corpus delicti.
BCLP reported that law enforcement agencies rarely make decisions on the termination of criminal cases involving specific individuals, since such a decision may be followed by rehabilitation, including a public apology from the Russian Federation’s Prosecutor's Office.
The BCLP team included the Head of its Criminal Law Business Protection practice Anton Gusev, Partner Vladimir Chikin, Senior Associate Angela Glamazdina, Lawyers Antonina Potanina and Alexander Kirilchenko, and Junior Lawyer Soslan Doguzov.
