CL-2021-000649 - [2025] EWHC 1333 (Comm)

The application for summary judgment was issued on 14 June 2024. It was supported by a witness statement of Stephen Browne, one of the joint administrators of VTBC, which pointed out that almost all the allegations pleaded had nothing to do with VTBC. It was however alleged by the Claimants that VTBC were involved in the making of a criminal complaint by VTB Russia in January 2016 (“the Criminal Complaint”) and that this led to wrongful criminal charges against Mr Gerasimenko. Mr Browne explained that VTBC were not involved in this and there was simply no evidence to support any allegation that VTBC were so involved. Indeed, on the basis of the documents available to Mr Browne, he says that VTBC only became aware of the Criminal Complaint in March 2016.

The materials put forward by Mr Browne led to a change of tack by the Claimants. Mr Browne exhibited documents and set out the chronology, so far as he was aware, between VTBC and its advisers and the Russian authorities. Based on what he said in his witness statement, the Claimants drafted pleading amendments to the effect that a lawyer at the law firm Morgan Lewis, Mr Marinichev, had made deliberately false statements to the Russian authorities on behalf of VTBC in a document referred to as the Explanations Document which led to charges in April 2016 against Mr Gerasimenko (referred to as “the Embezzlement Indictment”) and that it was this conduct that was now relied on in support of the allegation of VTBC’s involvement in the Raider Attack.

In the event, there is no reliance on the originally pleaded case against VTBC in the Claimants’ counsel’s skeleton argument and there was no reliance on it in oral argument. Counsel for the Claimants said he was not making concessions in relation to the original pleaded case, but his case was now based on the new allegations.

It is obvious that the originally pleaded case against VTBC was hopeless and I accept VTBC’s case on this. Whatever steps may have been taken by the other defendants (on which I express no view), there is simply no material to suggest that (subject to the proposed amendments) VTBC was involved in the Raider Attack, and the evidence suggests they only learned about the Criminal Complaint some weeks after it had been delivered to the Russian authorities.

The claim was commenced in November 2021 and the draft amendments were put forward in January 2025. It follows that the case which was being put forward against VTBC as justifying these proceedings against all ten defendants being brought in this jurisdiction has effectively been abandoned after over three years, and replaced by a new one after the application for reverse summary judgment was brought.