A dispute over the protection of a client from claims by a homeowners’ association (HOA) for more than 1.5 billion rubles was included in the list of cases deserving the greatest attention in 2024 according to Kommersant Publishing House. Case No. 8Г-19907/2024 (2-188/2024).
The victory in this dispute is important for the legal system and extremely important for the development business since it was possible to stop consumer extremism against the developer and the management company, in which the consumer abused his rights to obtain an unjustified benefit.
Several purchasers of luxury real estate in the Knightsbridge Private Park residential complex and the HOA they created filed a claim to compel the developer (LLC Khlebozavod No. 6) and the former management company (LLC Restavratsiya-N+) to eliminate within a month the defects found in the common house property. According to the plaintiffs, the common house property was not in the condition promised to them by the seller: it was made of the wrong materials, some decorative elements were missing, etc. Subsequently, the requirement to eliminate construction and operational defects in the common house property was transformed into a monetary claim. The lawyers of Bartolius Law Office were tasked with protecting the client from invalid claims by the HOA for more than 1.5 billion rubles.
The court of first instance recovered 820 million rubles from the developer, as well as 289 million rubles from the management company to eliminate the construction and operational deficiencies identified and assessed by a forensic examination. In addition, a penalty and a fine under the Law of the Russian Federation on the Protection of Consumer Rights of 506 million rubles were collected from the developer in favor of one of the plaintiffs. By the appellate ruling of the Moscow City Court dated 2024.04.26, the decision was left unchanged.
According to Takhmina Arabova, Bartolius Law Office’s Executive Partner, “Only in the cassation court (Second Cassation Court of General Jurisdiction) our lawyers were able to prove that the decisions of the lower courts were made with violation of the substantive and procedural law, to achieve the cancellation of the appellate ruling and to refer the case for a new trial to the Moscow City Court with a different panel of judges.”
Kommersant Publishing House annually reports on the most important disputes of the outgoing year. According to the methodology, the criterion for the significance of disputes is a combination of the following indicators:
1) the value of the financial assessment;
2) the significance of decisions for economic circulation;
3) the precedential nature of decisions;
4) the significance of the client in the industry/general economic circulation;
5) analysis of media attention to the case.
More about the rating: https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/7400736
