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.

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.

On 19 May, the Head of the Public-Private Partnership department at Maxima Legal, Vladimir Kilinkarov gave a presentation at an expert session on ‘Priorities for the development of infrastructure in the Urals’, which took place as part of a forum on PPP in the Ural Federal District in Chelyabinsk.

The expert session was divided into four parts in which the participants discussed the specifics of implementing PPP projects in the sectors of transport, waste management, heating and tourism and hospitality.

Vladimir Kilinkarov gave his presentation about the peculiarities of development, common mistakes and problems which are often encountered when implementing PPP projects in the transport sector.  The experts from this part of the session together with Vladimir also considered the opportunities to pursue transport projects without federal support, touched upon matters with implementing road projects on the basis of PPP in the industrial parts of the Urals and the public transport systems of towns and cities.

On 17 May an event organised by Meeting! on the topic of ‘New St Petersburg. Architect and developer: the balance between mass demand and city aesthetics’ took place.  Maxima Legal is the legal partner of Meeting!’s events.  Architects, developers and marketing personnel discussed how to satisfy consumer demand for new housing and at the same time protect the city from the spread of grey-faceless neighbourhoods.  During part of the discussions, Konstantin Boytsov, Head of the Real Estate and Construction department at Maxima Legal, commented on the copyright issues associated with advertising materials.

On 29 April in Moscow the final of the sixth annual contest for young section of the Russian branch of the International Fiscal Association took place. The annual contest started in 2012 and consists of moot courts with mock cases between tax authorities and taxpayers on current matters of international taxation.

Elena Kilinkarova, Counsel at Maxima Legal, took part in the work of the jury in the final stage of the contest. In the role of judge were representatives of the Federal Tax Service as well as partners and lawyers from a number of law firms, including Clifford Chance, Dentons, Ernst and Young and Herbert Smith Freehills.

In the contest teams from a number of leading universities were represented, including Moscow State University, Higher School of Economics, Moscow State Institute of International Relations, Financial University and All-Russian Academy of Foreign Trade, Kutafin Moscow State Law University and Voronezh State University.