EAHCISS News (English)

In this post we provide a fourth update on recent Russian court decisions. Case 4: Who needs a lawyer to claim Rosneft dividends in court...? The fourth case involves mr. Bychkov that held ADR's (depositary receipts) of Rosneft via the Cypriot broker EXT Ltd. and had them successfully converted via forced conversion. Mr. Bychkov then requested Rosneft to pay the unpaid dividends, which was only about 17,000 Rubles. Rosneft refused the request, stating that it wasn't sufficiently proven that mr. Bychkov owned the ADR's at the Rosneft dividends over 2021 that were returned by Raiffeisenbank to Rosneft (in the amount of 6,915,398,471.46 Rubles!!) included the dividends that were due to mr. Bychkov. Mr. Bychkov then went to court himself, without a lawyer. The relatively low claim of 17,000 Rubles would make it economically non-viable to be represented by a lawyer. Mr. Bychkov also didn't attend the hearing, probably due to travelling costs. The court established tha...

In this post we provide a first update on recent Russian court decisions. These court decisions were kindly provided by Irina Sibirina from the legal firm Itlektis.ru . More case law on Sberbank securities will follow soon. Case 1: Forced transfer of Rosneft shares and unpaid Rosneft dividends The first case involves an investor, mr. Gubaev, that bought Rosneft shares via the Swiss CBH Bank (the case materials speak in one section about directly buying ordinary shares but refer to converted depositary shares in another section). He applied to get his ordinary shares forcefully transferred from CBH Bank to his Russian brokerage account with ATON. According to the court materials, the chain of custody involved The Belgian Branch of Bank of New York Mellon and Citibank Russia. The Russian appellate court ruled in October 2023 that Citibank Russia had wrongfully denied the request for a forced transfer and ordered Citibank Russia to carry out the forced transfer. The full case materials ...