On 20 May, the last day of the St Petersburg International Legal Forum, in a park in central St Petersburg, the main summer sporting event for the St Petersburg legal community Legal Run took place. The event was organised to raise funds for the Russian charity Podari Zhizn which works with children who have cancer.
 
Maxima Legal took part in the race for the third time and was also a sponsor of the event. Victoria Churinova, Personal Assistant of the firm’s Managing Partner, finished in the women’s top ten for the distance of 5km. Congratulations to Victoria!

We would like to thank our colleagues from other law firms and from other companies for supporting this fundraising project and the Podari Zhizn Foundation.

The international project Legal Run takes place during the week from 20 to 27 May in 14 cities from Blagoveshchensk to London and involves more than 5,000 runners.

Partner at Maxima Legal, Vladimir Kilinkarov, was part of a board of examiners at the St Petersburg State University with students defending their dissertations for Master’s degrees on the topic of Tax Law.

The St Petersburg State University has taken a new approach to the forming of boards of examiners, with the boards now being made up of employers.  The members of the board also included the First Deputy Chairman of the Arbitration Court of St Petersburg and Leningrad region, Dimitri Vadimovich Khokhlov, judge from the Thirteenth Arbitration Appeals Court, Olga Vladimirovna Gorbacheva, as well as representatives from companies Pepeliaev Group and EY.

The Managing Partner of Maxima Legal, Maxim Avrashkov, and the Head of the Tax department, Elena Kilinkarova, who regularly take part in the St Petersburg International Legal Forum, have shared their impressions about the business and cultural programme of the Forum which took place from 15 to 20 May in the General Staff building of the Hermitage in St Petersburg.

Maxim and Elena noted that the strong business programme included a large number of fringe events, also that there was an international makeup to the delegates and experiments with new event formats, notably a mock tax dispute which involved representatives from the Federal Tax Service and judges from the Supreme Arbitration Court of the Russian Federation.

The cultural programme of the Forum was also varied and rich: from a concert of the world-famous chamber ensemble of Moscow Soloists who were conducted by Yury Bashmet at the St Petersburg Philharmonia (whose legal partners are Maxima Legal) to parties on Rubenstein street as part of Legal Street. Delegates of the Forum were also able to take part in a charity run called Legal Run (for information about Maxima Legal’s participation in the run, read here) and to take part in a regatta.  The format of the Forum provided for productive discussions and exchanges of experience, both from professional and social perspectives.

According to Maxim and Elena, the Forum is one of the best events in Russia where lawyers can discuss current matters and questions and at the same time socialise.

For further information about the Forum, please see the following link.