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The BIEL team defends the interests of bona fide purchasers in a process whereby the Federal Property Management Agency requires demolition of more than two dozens of private houses built on the land privatized by the Leninsky District, Moscow Region...

10 February 2017

The BIEL team defends the interests of bona fide purchasers in a process whereby the Federal Property Management Agency requires demolition of more than two dozens of private houses built on the land privatized by the Leninsky District, Moscow Region, and formerly owned by the RSFSR Literary Fund. A key session under a claim brought by the Federal Property Management Agency as instructed by the Presidential Administration against 24 defendants owning private houses in the Vnukovskoe village, Leninsky District, Moscow Region took place in the Scherbinka District Court of Moscow. In August 2016, the Federal Property Management Agency brought a claim to force the defendants to demolish their private houses at their cost and confiscate the underlying land in favor of the Russian Federation.

The conflict is a direct consequence of the 1991 developments where following the collapse of the USSR and the resulting legal vacuum, considerable assets formerly owned by the RSFSR Literary Fund were transferred to the Literary Fund of Russia established by the VIII Extraordinary Congress of the RSFSR Writers’ Union.

Over the 1990s and 2000s, the Literary Fund had given up a part of the transferred land, only to be further managed by the Leninsky District Administration, Moscow Region, as non-distributed public property.

In 2012, a conflict involving the Literary Fund’s officials flared up, only to result in the Russian President’s instruction to the Federal Property Management Fund to take steps to return the illegally alienated federal property to the state.

The Federal Property Management Fund brought up a number of claims to prove that the Literary Fund of Russia had not been established as a successor to the RSFSR Literary Fund while neither the fund nor the district administration had the right to dispose of the land qualified as the property of the federal government. The Federal Property Management Fund also succeeded in collecting in favor of the state the real estate in Moscow, Moscow Region and Saint-Petersburg held not only by the Literary Fund of Russia but also third-party buyers.

According to N.I. Sapozhnikov, head of the BIEL dispute resolution practice, in the previous lawsuits concerning the assets formerly held by the Literary Fund of Russia, courts tended to ignore on various legal grounds both the factor of bona fide purchase of the claimed assets and the fact that the plaintiff had missed the limitation period.

However, in the current lawsuit handled by the BIEL team, we succeeded in building a clear legal position based on the Supreme Court of Russia’s practice for the defense of our clients’ interests.

Èñòî÷íèê: rapsinews.ru