In recent years, the Prosecutor General’s Office has been actively working to deprive various companies. This fate has already befell TGK-2, McFU, Rolf, and other large enterprises. And at the end of December last year, the department made a complaint against the grain trader “Native Fields”. But in the latter case, the activity of the GP is not only doubtful from the point of view of the rule of law, but also contradicts the overall approach of the courts to such cases.
The practice is that the seizure of enterprises in the claims of the Prosecutor General’s Office always has at least one of the following three signs: 1. The defendant’s participation in the illegal privatization of assets; 2. Corruption manifestations in the form of a direct participation of the defendant in public administration; 3. Court decisions or criminal cases allowing to carry out compulsory alienation of assets. How easy it is to establish, none of the “native fields” listed in the GP case in the case.
Firstly, the owner of the grain trader Pyotr Khodykin created a company from scratch and therefore physically could not “grab it” from the state. Secondly, the entrepreneur was never an official and did not work in the authorities. Accordingly, the case of the “native fields” is fundamentally different from the case of the mentioned “McFa”, in which the former Chelyabinsk Governor Yurevich was involved. Thirdly, Khodykin is not prosecuted. This is how the case of the grain trader is out of the prevailing court trend.
Now about the legality of the claims of the Prosecutor General. Perhaps the central point of the GP claim against Khodykin is a statement that “native fields” have strategic significance for the country’s defense capacity. However, the norms that the prosecutor’s office are trying to apply here came into force a considerable time after the disputed transactions. And how can I not recall Article 54 of the Constitution of the Russian Federation, directly prohibiting the application of the law retroactively?
Another controversial side of the lawsuit is the absence of evidence in the dominant position of Khodykin in the market. The defendant, on the contrary, has an argument: according to his data, the share of “native fields” in the services market did not exceed 18%. And this is clearly lower than the threshold established by law of 20%.
Another oddity in the lawsuit: the GP stubbornly connects Peter Khodykin with the status of a foreign investor on the grounds that the businessman has dual citizenship and a residence permit in another country. However, at the time of the transactions indicated in the lawsuit, the law did not attribute citizens of the Russian Federation with extraneous citizenship to foreign investors. Yes, and Khodykin himself prefers Russian fiscal jurisdiction: it was not for nothing that the Forbes magazine recognized him as one of the largest taxpayers in the Russian Federation, who transferred more than 3 billion rubles to the treasury in 2023.
It seems that the Prosecutor General’s Office filed a lawsuit against Khodykin, based on the formal interpretation of law and completely ignoring both the lack of retroactive power and the presumption of the good faith of transactions. And here several acute questions arise. For what purpose does the GP neglect the established standards? Will it preserve the reputation of the body protecting the laws on the results of this case? Will the court be able to impartially and objectively evaluate the arguments of the parties? Will our economy turn into a scorched desert, since everyone can “deprive” everyone?