The Zamoskvoretsky District Court began proceedings as part of the struggle for the inheritance of the late co-owner of the Gazprom contractor and restaurateur Zurab Lysov. A significant part of its assets, including bank accounts for 300 million rubles. in Russia, $500 thousand in Bulgaria and the White Hart Pub restaurant in Moscow City worth about $5 million, the businessman wrote to his beloved, 45-year-old employee of MiniCrane LLC Ekaterina Belova. The heiress, however, was dissatisfied with the distribution, believing that the interests of her teenage son were not taken into account. Now she wants to get another part of Mr. Lysov’s mansion in Barvikha, near Moscow, worth 3.5 billion rubles.
The process began with a scandal. While the plaintiff herself and her lawyer Victoria Boyko did not object to the journalists gathered in the hall, another of her lawyers, Lidia Nefedycheva, unexpectedly took the floor. She stated that the inheritance dispute would discuss the private lives of its participants, including the 16-year-old son of her trustee Andrei, and on this basis asked to close the process from outsiders. Taking advantage of the pause taken by the judge Marina Musimovich to think over the decision, the journalists tried to question the plaintiff and her representatives about the essence of the stated demands. “There will be no comments from our side,” Ms. Nefedicheva said for everyone. “Whoever told you about this meeting, let him communicate with you.”
After the process was closed, the participants in the proceedings told Kommersant that this time Ms. Belova and her team were claiming 1/6 of the three-story mansion of Zurab Lysov with an area of 1766 square meters. m, located on a plot of 157 acres in the elite cottage village “Maiendorf Gardens” in the Odintsovo urban district of the Moscow region.
The businessman, who died in February 2021, bequeathed the estate to his daughter Diana, who has been living in the UK for a long time, and she inherited six months after her father’s death.
Mr. Lysov’s cohabitant Belova, who also received her share in the estate in the Gardens, then did not claim it and even told the notary that there were no other dependent heirs. However, two years later she remembered that during the distribution of property, her son Andrey remained undressed. The young man, according to Mrs. Belova, was also dependent on her partner due to the impossibility of earning a living on his own. Mr. Lysov, according to her, paid for foreign language tutors for the boy and his classes in sports sections, bought him laptops and mobile phones, and shortly before his death he made a gift that he had long asked for – a Labrador Retriever puppy for 60 thousand rubles. rub.
Given these circumstances, Ms. Belova asked the Zamoskvoretsky Court to correct the mistake she made two years ago. Namely, to recognize her son as a dependent of Zurab Lysov, to restore the missed deadline for the young man to claim his inheritance claims and to write off a sixth of the estate in his favor. Or to recover from the daughter of the deceased who inherited the asset the equivalent of a share in the amount of 536 million rubles. The court failed to resolve this issue in one sitting.
Zurab Lysov, co-owner of Gazprom’s contracting company ZAO Sevzaptruboprovodstroy and five restaurants in the capital, including the White Hart Pub on Neglinnaya Street and in the Oko tower in the Moscow City complex, fell seriously ill in the spring of 2019. He was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. Since the businessman had divorced his wife by this time, and their adult children Diana and Zurab Lysov Jr. had long lived separately, his girlfriend Ekaterina Belova appeared in the patient’s mansion along with her son. A Moscow oligarch and a modest employee of Dorstroyservis LLC and MiniCrane LLC in St. Petersburg, who receives a little more than 20 thousand rubles in them. a month, they had known each other for many years, but before Mr. Lysov’s illness they met infrequently.
On January 21, 2021, two weeks before his death, the businessman, already in the Botkin hospital, issued a donation to his girlfriend, transferring 300 million rubles to her. on accounts with Bank Vozrozhdenie, about $500,000 kept in a bank in Bulgaria, and a restaurant in Moscow City worth $5 million.
The rest of the property went to the children of Mr. Lysov Diana and Zurab. All parties were dissatisfied with the distribution of assets.
Mr. Lysov, Jr. filed a lawsuit with the Presnensky District Court, asking that the deed of gift be declared invalid. According to him, the staff of the Botkin hospital claimed that on the day the document was signed, the patient was in an extremely serious condition, he hardly spoke, and in the evening of the same day he ended up in intensive care. At the same time, three post-mortem psychological and psychiatric studies of the state of Zurab Lysov conducted as part of the trial gave conflicting results. In the Central Clinical Psychiatric Hospital named after Usoltsev, they could not assess its adequacy “in hindsight”, and in the psychiatric hospital in Yegorievsk near Moscow they quickly decided that the donor acted in his right mind. The examination appointed by the court at the Serbsky Federal Research Center established that the patient had not been diagnosed with mental disorders and was not under the influence of narcotic painkillers. The Presnensky Court eventually dismissed the claim.
While the court dealt with the adequacy of Lysov Sr., Lysov Jr. became a defendant in a criminal case on especially large-scale theft (Article 158 of the Criminal Code), initiated by the police of Istra near Moscow.
Ekaterina Belova in a statement indicated that the son of the deceased illegally used his father’s bank card, thus stealing 4.2 million rubles. from the money bequeathed to her. The accused explained to the Istra City Court that his sister really used her father’s money, but only when the disease had passed into the thermal stage. At the expense of these funds, the costs of his treatment in Israel at a cost of $50,000 were compensated, and then the funeral, which took 4.5 million rubles.
According to the defendant, the crypt alone at the Troekurovsky cemetery cost 3.6 million rubles. Two weeks ago, the Istra City Court recognized that Lysov Jr. managed his father’s money, not yet knowing that they were bequeathed to another person, so his actions cannot be considered theft. Nevertheless, the defendant was sentenced to a fine of 70 thousand rubles. for arbitrariness (Article 330 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation).
It should be noted that in parallel with the criminal case on the theft of money in the Odintsovo police, a similar criminal case was investigated against Ekaterina Belova. She, in turn, was accused by the children of the deceased of stealing jewelry from the mansion. According to the applicants, while hastily leaving her Moscow apartment after the death of a friend, Ms Belova grabbed a collection of watches that Lysov’s father and son had traditionally given each other for birthdays. Among the missing were Rolex, Hublot and Breguet with a total value of about $ 200 thousand, as well as a gold cross with diamonds, presented to the deceased by his ex-wife, a table service for 6 million rubles, several bottles of strong alcohol and even a water cooler. Ms. Belova, however, managed to convince the investigator that her lover had given all these things to her shortly before his death, and the criminal case was dismissed.
The lawyer for the children of the late Zurab Lysov, Alexei Gorbachev, told Kommersant that he did not agree with the conclusions of both the Presnensky District Court, which denied his client a civil lawsuit, and Istrinsky, who found Lysov Jr. guilty of arbitrariness.
According to him, all these decisions were made thanks to the active participation in the processes of the former magistrate Lidia Nefedycheva, who represents the interests of Ekaterina Belova as a lawyer. As Gorbachev’s lawyer explained, Ms. Nefedycheva somehow involved the investigator of the Istra MVD, who was investigating the alleged theft, in collecting evidence for the civil process. As part of the criminal case, the investigation appointed two post-mortem psychological and psychiatric examinations of the deceased, which were then attached to the materials of the Presnensky District Court. Finally, in the case of the theft, the investigator for some reason interviewed the attending physician Lysov Sr. at the Botkin hospital, and asked him questions together with the lawyer Nefedycheva. Seeing the latter at the trial in the Presnensky court, the doctor-witness even asked who she was: a lawyer, an “assistant investigator”, as he put it, or simply a “civilian.”
“We believe that all these investigative actions were carried out illegally and unreasonably,” defense attorney Gorbachev told Kommersant. “And since their results influenced the court decisions, they will be appealed to higher courts.”