The US Federal Court for the Southern District of New York on February 27 rejected the claim of PPF Management LLC, under which the company demanded $ 750 million from Sberbank, its president Herman Gref and a number of other persons for losing control of Pavlovskgranitom, a large crushing enterprise. The court decided that the case was unfit for him and he had no right to consider it, the representative of Sberbank explained.
Until the end of 2009, Sergei Poimanov was the largest owner of Pavlovskgranit. The enterprise was credited to Sberbank, Poimanov personally was a guarantor for loans, but neither he nor the enterprise could service debts. Therefore, in the end, Poimanov lost his property. The businessman repeatedly tried to challenge this in the Russian courts, but without success. PPF Management repurchased the rights of claiming the defendants from the former owner of the company, estimated the damage from the loss of property of $ 500 million, as well as moral damage of $ 250 million, and sued Sberbank and Gref at the end of 2016.
The lawsuit of the PPF stated that the defendants had entered into a criminal conspiracy to raider the capture of Pavlovskgranita. In the summer of 2017, the US court declared Poymanov bankrupt, ruled that the Russian court's decisions in the matter of his bankruptcy take precedence in the United States (by that time Poimanov was also declared bankrupt in Russia). Thus, the US court found that the transfer of claims for $ 750 million from Poimanov to PPF Management is illegal and the claims must remain in the general competitive mass. The US court has banned PPF Management and Poimanov from filing any lawsuits in the US courts related to the sale of a pledge of shares of Pavlovskgranit, said an interlocutor close to one of the defendants in court.
Get a comment Poimanov's representative about whether he will challenge the decision of the US federal court for the Southern District of New York or apply to other courts, has not yet been successful.
The US court in summer noted in one of the decisions that in the evidence submitted by PPF, there are no signs of raider capture of Pavlovskgranit. Judge Mary Kay Wisconsil in her ruling noted that PPF experts provided general evidence of the existence of such a phenomenon as "raiding in Russia", but did not provide concrete evidence of raiding against Pavlovskgranit. Evidence of corruption and other violations by Russian courts, the American court for bankruptcy "Pavlovskgranita" did not see.