PRAGNUM collects USD 3 million

Debt collection under a loan agreement, and even if there is a certificate for receipt of funds by the debtor, what could be easier? — This is what almost every competent lawyer will think when assessing the chances of success in such a case. But each individual case, even the simplest, can have a completely different outcome than the one that the lawyer and his client expect. It was with such a seemingly simple, but very unpredictable case that PRAGNUM’s lawyers had to face.

Our client intended to repay the loan in the amount of USD 3 million, which was owed to him by an “experienced” debtor, who is also under the “protectorate” of influential political and economic groups of the state. At the same time, guided by the life credo: “debts are repaid only by cowards”, the debtor for some time quite confidently convinced the court that the creditor (our client) is a stranger to him, who is generally unable to collect “several bags of cash in foreign currency”. In addition, the debtor wished to support his own position on the case with the conclusion of forensic expertise regarding the answer to the question of whether he (the debtor) wrote the text of the receipt at all. Given the positive response of the expert for the debtor (it turned out that the debtor did not seem to write the text of the receipt), the debtor hoped that this was more than enough to avoid repayment of the debt.

However, PRAGNUM’s lawyers managed to prove that what really matters is not who wrote (filled out) the text of the receipt, but who signed it (signed its content). In addition, with the help of carefully collected evidence in the case, it was possible to convince the court that the client and the debtor are former business partners who had close social and economic ties, and, most importantly, that the client had more than enough officially declared income, which allowed him to easily provide the disputed loan amount to the debtor. Taking into account the fact that the debtor did not provide evidence in support of his position, that the receipt was not signed by him, all his other speculations were completely refuted by the evidence collected by PRAGNUM’s lawyers. In the end, the court, taking into account the arguments of the parties to the dispute, came to a reasonable conclusion that the plaintiff’s representatives proved the fact of transferring funds and the need to repay the loan amount by the debtor.