Raider capture, style “furniture”

More than a hundred families may be left without work, falling into the millstones of the conflict with the show masks.

In the village of Polivanovo, Ulyanovsk region, raided “dashing 90s”. A situation resembling a raider takeover occurred at a city-forming enterprise – a furniture factory “Good Style-Furniture”. After the workers were unable to get to the factory, they sent an SOS signal to all possible authorities, including the Russian Investigative Committee. The correspondent of The Moscow Post in the Ulyanovsk region understood the situation.

About 1 thousand people live in Polivanovo. The factory, at its peak of development, provided jobs for about 300 people, that is, in fact, becoming a city-forming enterprise for the settlement.

The fate of many families depends on whether it will work and develop successfully, that is, the issue of showdowns within the factory and the conflict of owners has already gone beyond the dispute between business entities. This is no longer the business of businessmen, but a potential point of social tension. The workers, who once were no longer able to get to their jobs, turned to the authorities and the Investigative Committee of Russia, as well as to the Prosecutor General Igor Krasnov with a request to intervene in the situation around the factory.

Photo: Screenshot from video

As follows from the video clip, about 200 workers and one of the owners, Sergey Smirnov, were not allowed into the factory, the entrances and exits at the facility were blocked, and the guards refused to let people inside. Allegedly, this was done at the direction of the second owner – Elena Khotovitskaya and the then current director Nariman Abuleev, which we will discuss later. In the video, the owner, who was not allowed into the factory, calls it the seizure of the factory.

History is already backfiring on the village. Thus, the number of workers has sharply decreased and has not yet returned to its previous level: at the beginning of 2020, compared to 2019, 33 employees remained at the factory instead of 184. At the beginning of 2022, 125 people work at the enterprise.

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In addition, at the end of 2022, the company “Good Style-Furniture” received a net loss of 22.4 million rubles. The loss in 2021 was 29 thousand rubles. And the lower the financial indicators of the taxpayer, the lower the tax revenues to the budgets.

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What happened to the once successful factory and why was the attention of the Sledkom needed?

Cat in a bag

OOO “Good Style-Furniture” (“DSM”) was founded in 2013 on the basis of a factory that had existed since the 90s, but was experiencing difficulties. The owner of the LLC at the start was Anna Dovgan, the daughter of an athlete and businessman Sergei Smirnov, who was listed as the owner until May 2019. After this date, Smirnov himself became the owner – co-founder of LLC “Regional Federation of Ashihara Kaikan Karate of the Ulyanovsk Region”, as well as similar public organizations in the field of martial arts. The daughter transferred, under a donation agreement, to him 50% of the shares that she had at that time.

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As the media wrote, in 2014 Smirnov invited his friend Yuri Khotovitsky to develop his business. He accepted the offer, in 2014 he bought out a 50% stake from Anna Dovgan, but registered it with his then common-law wife Elena Panova, later Khotovitskaya. An entry about Khotovitskaya appeared in the Unified State Register of Legal Entities in August 2015. And in the same period strange things began. Some legal entities appeared at the address of the factory with the same main activity – the production of furniture and a furniture wholesale agent: LLC “Lifestyle” and OOO “Good Style” (“DC”), who later changed their registration to the city of Barysh – to the same legal address, which indicates their possible connection. Although these companies were owned by different individuals.

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Both of the above companies and their owners were featured in a 2021 lawsuit to recover damages allegedly caused to the factory “Good Style-Furniture” in the form of 7 million rubles of lost profits. According to the materials of this case, the plaintiff Smirnov indicated that the above individuals organized LLC “DC” and OOO “Lifestyle”transferring all LLC sales to them “DSM”, which allegedly caused the claimed losses to the factory in 2018 – 7.1 million rubles. The plaintiff connected all the defendants with Khotovitskaya. In court, the plaintiff failed to prove his position, but the case itself revealed the first oddities in this story. At the same time, in another legal dispute, Khotovitskaya already attributes to Smirnov connections with the legal owners of these LLCs. The situation became even more nervous and confused.

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Hotovitskaya currently owns shares in only two operating companies – the Ulyanovsk factory and the Moscow LLC “Flowers”which in 2013-2017 rented premises for a store from the Federal State Budgetary Institution “Nmits of oncology them. N.N. Blokhin” Ministry of Health of Russia. Two more Moscow assets of Khotovitskaya have been liquidated today. She also has the status of an individual entrepreneur with a residence permit all in the same Moscow. It is probably in the capital that Mr.. lives, visiting the Ulyanovsk factory only from time to time.

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Criminal showdown

But the story with the emergence of new legal entities at the address of the furniture factory in Polivanovo did not end. As Life reported with reference to Smirnov, his friend Denis Korablev was kidnapped in 2016. According to Korablev, who later managed to escape, five unknown men in masks allegedly kidnapped the man and took him to the forest to a pre-dug grave, forcing him to slander Smirnov. Later, as part of a criminal case, three of the five failed killers were detained and convicted, but the rest of the defendants, including the customer, were never identified. Or didn’t want to look?

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The oddities didn’t end there either. In 2020, from the materials of the court case heard in the Ulyanovsk Regional Court, it will become known that already at the start of joining the owners of the factory and until 2017, Hotovitskaya (then Panova) allegedly lent the factory. And the debt by the time of the trial had accumulated in the amount of 27.9 million rubles. For an enterprise, such an amount is so large that it could go bankrupt. Why could this be done? And here everything is nowhere more obvious – such debts could force the second owner to get rid of the asset, transferring a share to the creditor as compensation. Moreover, in the first instance, Khotovitskaya won the dispute. But the second court did not recognize all these debt obligations and canceled the decision, actually pointing to illegality.

It turned out that in the material of the first instance, copies of loan agreements certified by a notary were presented as a justification for debts, and the agreements themselves, despite repeated petitions from the defendant, were not presented. Khotovitskaya, judging by the materials of the court, stated that the original loan agreements were stolen from her car in Moscow. As a result, the fact that the lady did not present the original contracts also made it impossible to examine the authenticity of the date of the documents.

In addition, the defendants pointed to an inconsistency in the contract dated July 31, 2015, allegedly drawn up between Khotovitskaya and LLC “Good Style-Furniture” in the amount of 1.25 million rubles. The fact is that in the agreement, Khotovitskaya E.V. is indicated as the lender, while at the date of the conclusion of the agreement the plaintiff bore the name Panova, married to Khotovitsky Yu.M. she entered only on September 26, 2015, changing her surname at the same time. At the same time, the contract indicated the details of the plaintiff’s passport, which she had after changing her passport in connection with marriage. Did the lender open a third eye that predicted new passport data?

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In general, both the testimony of witnesses and the oddities with the contracts themselves make one wonder if the money was borrowed? For example, in the framework of another legal dispute, the same Smirnov argued that, in fact, the loan agreements formalized the money received from the sale of products, while the “loan agreements were non-monetary and were concluded, including for the purpose of further bankruptcy of the company”. Ultimately, the second instance took into account the arguments and canceled the verdict of the first instance on the recovery of the debt.

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With the same proceedings on loan agreements, it turned out that Smirnov applied to the police, demanding to check the legitimacy of the plaintiff’s actions as a member of the company in disposing of the company’s funds. According to Smirnov, in the period from 2015 to 2017, Nariman Abuleev (director of the enterprise since 2013) and Khotovitskaya entered into fictitious loan agreements in the amount of more than 27 million rubles.

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The conflict reached its peak when Smirnov, after the end of the employment contract with Abuleev, who played on the side of Khotovitskaya, appointed Evgeny Suvorov as director. At the same time, judging by the materials of the litigation, Abuleev even managed to issue a power of attorney to his person during the period when he was not a director (some completely wild round of violations comes out).

But after long legal battles, in August 2020, Abuleev became the director again.

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Khotovitskaya in 2022, through the court, tried to recover financial and administrative documents from the ex-director Suvorov. It came to accusations of almost stealing documents, but the competent authorities refused to initiate such a criminal case against the new director. Judging by the materials of court cases, the co-owners did not agree on who should be the director (in fact, whose person will manage the asset), and because of this, it was not possible to reach a compromise.

In general, the situation at the factory looks wild and does not add peace to the workers.

Factory carve-up continues

Today, arbitration is still hearing a dispute related to the right to own a factory in Polivanovo. It’s been going on for over three years now. Sergei Smirnov is still trying to regain his stake in the furniture factory. The next hearing in the case is scheduled for June 27, 2023.

Initially, Elena Khotovitskaya demanded that Smirnov be excluded from the list of owners, as part of which interim measures were imposed, effectively blocking any actions on the part of the second owner. In response, Smirnov demanded that Khotovitskaya be excluded from the list of owners. This struggle began for a long two years, and in October 2022, Smirnov, after a corresponding court decision, left the number of owners (it is this verdict that is being disputed). Then, in October 2022, Khotovitskaya appointed herself the director of the factory, which she remains to this day.

And now there is the following picture: 50% of the factory’s share belongs to Khotovitskaya, and 50% is the undistributed share of the enterprise itself. Do what you want.

However, the financial results of 2022 have already shown the consequences of these internal showdowns for the factory. As always, in this story, the victims were the workers who were sucked into the millstones of this conflict with the show masks. Now it’s up to the Sledkom and the Prosecutor General’s Office, where the factory workers turned. We hope that they will help put an end to this protracted story.