PRAGNUM collects more than UAH 58 million in favour of the pioneer of the Ukrainian IT industry

PRAGNUM’s clients usually come to us at the stage of conflict and potential litigation risks, but in this case, surprisingly, the client came to us with a ready-made court decision to recover the debt.

It would seem that the only thing left to do was to enforce the judgement, but, as you might have guessed, this task was, so to speak, “with an asterisk”.

The main problem that prevented the judgement from being enforced and the full amount of the debt from being recovered was that the debtor was a specially authorised central executive body whose activities are directed and coordinated by the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine.

An even bigger problem, as it turned out later, was that the enforcement of such a decision fell within the competence of another government body, namely the State Treasury Service of Ukraine.

The debtor, by the way, even repaid the debt voluntarily from time to time, but given the size of such repayments, the entire amount of the debt would have been received only by the client’s grandchildren.

In order to move the situation forward and refute the debtor’s arguments about the lack of budgetary funds, the existence of a priority of repayment and other “standard” arguments to avoid paying the debt by a state body, PRAGNUM initiated judicial and criminal proceedings and even obtained a decision of the European Court of Human Rights. 

Of course, this toolkit worked, and the entire debt was fully repaid.

However, just as appetite comes with eating, this project could not just end there, as PRAGNUM managed to obtain two more court decisions for the client to recover from the debtor UAH 29 million in inflationary losses and 3% per annum for the entire period of delay, which was a “pleasant surprise” for the client against the background of his primary desire to receive only the principal amount.

Understanding the futility of ignoring the payment of 29 million inflationary losses and 3% per annum and PRAGNUM’s knowledge of the realistic recovery mechanism, the debtor fully paid the amount within 6 months on the basis of the settlement agreement.