Over the last few years the number of cyberattacks on banks has dramatically increased.  On the basis of a forecast made by Positive Technologies, which is cited by Kommersant Sankt-Peterburg, such crimes will continue to increase at least 30% a year.  According to data prepared by the Bank of Russia, in 2016 there were 717 unauthorised transfers from the accounts of organisations or companies with a value of 1.89 billion roubles, and from current accounts, there were 296,700 unauthorised operations with a value of 1.08 billion roubles.

Senior Associate at Maxima Legal, Maxim Ali, who specialises in IP/IT matters, commented that the St Petersburg City Court over the past few years has mainly refused claims from customers to recover losses from banks.  “In such situations the courts cite that banks have fulfilled all the legislative requirements and service conditions of the bank cards, and the customer’s consent to the operation was assumed, since a secret code was entered on his behalf. For example, a PIN code, CVV/CVC or security code sent by SMS.”

For the full version of the article (in Russian), click.

On 28 July, Delovoy Peterburg, a business newspaper, published an article titled ‘Freight with a duplicate’, which analysed the conduct of lawyers in a matter for offshore debts of St Petersburg companies for 3.7 billion roubles, that had been approved by a court.

The Seychelles office of DKGroup Ltd made a claim against OOO Klassika in the Arbitration Court of St Petersburg and Leningrad region to recover 500,000 rouble debt in a shipping contract.  At the first hearing, the offshore company increased its claim to over 1 billion roubles, which the defendant accepted and the parties concluded a settlement which the court approved.  Shortly after this matter, the claimant and the defendant changed: the creditor became a Czech company, Embulpure s.r.o. and the debtor, OOO Kamelit SPB.  

After which, the claimant and the defendant again changed:  Embulpure passed the debt to Estonian company FelixEst OU and Kamelit SPB to OOO Alliance Logistic and the new legal successors initiated proceedings to obtain an duplicate court order.

Опрошенные ДП эксперты сошлись на том, что в данном случае была разыграна классическая схема вывода денег за рубеж по судебному акту. Непонятным остался только вопрос ходатайства о выдаче дубликата исполнительного листа.

The experts interviewed by DP agreed that on the facts in this case it was a classic scheme for transferring money abroad using a court decision. The only question that remained unclear was the application for a duplicate of the court order.

Sergei Bakeshin commented on the situation that: “It is possible that the case was for one client, who needed to transfer funds from a number of formally unconnected companies.  And maybe a kind of package service: registration of a company whose main asset is a debt to an offshore company for 2 billion roubles. After which, the company can be offered to anyone who might wish to transfer money overseas; to buy a company to which it can be indebted to.  After which the transaction is completed in two contracts: an assignment and a debt transfer.  And then a new client is found and the process is repeated.”

For more information (in Russian) see dp.ru.

On 28 July, news agency REGNUM published an article titled ‘Durov’s position does not match Russia’s laws’, which considered the issue of the potential blocking of the Telegram app.

At the present moment, the founder of Telegram, Pavel Durov has agreed for the app to be include in the registry maintained by Roskomnadzor (the state regulator of the media); however, he has refused to comply with the requirements of Yarovaya’s law (a controversial law regarding regulation of the internet), as he considers this “technically unrealisable”.

Senior Associate at Maxima Legal, Maxim Ali, who specialises in IP/IT matters, explained to REGNUM, that Telegram is considered by Russian legislation to be an organisation that spreads information, which means that it is obligated to store and provide law enforcement agencies with logs of the exchange of messages between users.

Maxim also commented that the storage of exchanged information on the company’s servers which complies with measures for security and confidentiality of the data, does not amount to a breach of the secret correspondence to which Durov refers.  Such matters are regulated by federal law, and according to the Constitution can be reviewed by the Constitutional Court.

For the full version of the article, please see the following link.