Two projects by the Law firm are included in ‘Disputes of the Year: Map of the Most Significant Court Cases of 2025 According to Kommersant’

Two projects by Kovalev, Tugushi & Partners were featured in ‘Disputes of the Year: Kommersant's Map of the Most Significant Court Cases of 2025.’

Two of the Law Firm's disputes, worth over 1 trillion RUB, were included in Kommersant's Map of the Most Significant Court Cases of 2025. The ranking was published on 17 December 2025 as part of the Legal Business supplement.

Client: former member of the Revision Commission (statutory auditor) of Otkritie Holding JSC

Financial valuation: RUB 1 trillion

Law firm: Kovalev, Tugushi & Partners

Description: The bankruptcy administrator of Otkritie Holding JSC applied to the arbitration court to hold the persons controlling the debtor subsidiarily liable for the amount of outstanding claims of creditors in excess of RUB 1 trillion.

Along with the managers, members of the management board and board of directors, the administrator requested that the persons who had distorted the financial statements, as well as the company's internal auditor, be held liable. The internal auditor was charged with grounds for liability: improper control over financial and economic activities, participation in the distortion of financial statements, and causing significant harm to creditors by withdrawing money for himself under an invalid contract.

The Law Firm succeeded in defending the legal position that the internal auditor did not have the status of a controlling debtor, reinforcing this issue in court practice. The court also agreed with the lawyers' position that the client could not be held liable for entering into an invalid transaction, proving that it was not significant for the debtor in terms of the scale of its activities.

In the episode concerning the distortion of financial statements, the client became one of three defendants against whom a decision was made to deny the claims. As a result of the dispute, the courts of two instances refused to hold the client liable on a subsidiary basis.

Client: former chairman of the board of directors and former member of the bank's management board

Financial valuation: RUB 11 billion

Law firm: Kovalev, Tugushi & Partners

Description: The Law Firm managed to protect the clients from the recovery of losses in the amount of RUB 11 billion in the bankruptcy case of Interprombank JSC.

The bank's top managers were charged with several groups of episodes: 75 instances of issuing knowingly non-repayable loans to 20 borrowers, including those belonging to Dmitry Mazurov's Novy Potok group of companies, including the Mari Oil Refinery and other oil traders; incidents of providing bank guarantees for knowingly non-repayable obligations.

During the proceedings, the lawyers took the lead in working with the evidence, which consisted of multi-volume credit files for each of the 80 incidents. Thanks to the highly efficient organisation of work with the evidence, the team of lawyers defended the position that each loan was economically justified, taking into account the assessment of the borrowers' financial situation, the quality of debt servicing and the category of loans at the date of issue. At the same time, the lawyers defended the position that the rule on the protection of business decisions (business judgment rule), formulated by the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation in the bankruptcy cases of Baltika and Greenfield banks, was applicable to the dispute, and that when voting on the issuance of loans, the members of the credit committee had strictly complied with all corporate procedures and had been guided by the positive conclusions of the relevant departments of the bank. As a result, the courts of first and second instance fully denied the bankruptcy trustee's claim for recovery of damages.

Details of the study:

Kommersant selected disputes that, according to the editorial board, deserve the most attention in 2025. They are diverse, but reflect the trends in capital movements in the current year.

The criteria for the significance of disputes, according to the methodology of previous years, are a combination of the following indicators: 1) the amount of the financial assessment; 2) the significance of the decisions for economic turnover; 3) the precedent nature of the decisions; 4) the significance of the client in the industry/overall economic turnover; 5) analysis of media attention to the case, primarily in Kommersant. Based on the results of the study, the disputes that had the greatest impact on the market were selected.