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- From assignment to assignment: drivers receive claims for hundreds of thousands for old accidents
From assignment to assignment: drivers receive claims for hundreds of thousands for old accidents
Residents of the Nizhny Novgorod region told Izvestia about a scheme by which emergency commissioners and car lawyers extort money from the perpetrators of accidents even years later. The victim's car has long been repaired, the dispute has been settled, and suddenly the person who dented someone's door in 2022 is being sued for damages of 200 thousand rubles. It's all about the assignment agreement. Efficient "auto lawyers" convince the victim to conclude an agreement on the assignment of the rights to claim damages after an accident under the pretext that nothing will be achieved from the insurance company. After that, the assignees get a lot of money, first from the insurance company, and then — through the court — also from the culprit of the accident. Izvestia investigated whether it was possible to fight this scheme and who was involved in it.
How car lawyers work with old accidents
Dozens of people have already suffered from the actions of car lawyers in the Nizhny Novgorod region. The scheme is always the same: emergency commissioners arrive at the scene of an accident to issue a European protocol. They try their best to persuade the victim of the accident to conclude a contract of assignment of the claim in order to receive compensation. In this case, the victim is paid a small amount in cash, which should be enough to repair the car.
One of the victims of the accident, Elena, told Izvestia how it happens. She had an accident on February 11, 2023. Emergency commissioners arrived at the scene. They offered to help, assuring that the insurance companies are currently working very poorly and nothing can be obtained from them. The family was sent to a certain Loss Management Center. Already there, the Malkovs were persuaded to sign an assignment agreement. According to him, the victims of the accident received 110 thousand rubles. However, they later found out that the insurance company had paid 311,000 rubles to the assignees, and later they also came to court with an expert assessment of the loss in an accident in the amount of 848,000 rubles. These amounts went to the accounts of the assignee, IE Kreiderman.
Attempts to terminate the assignment agreement did not lead to anything. The courts sided with the assignees.
This is the car lawyers' scheme: after concluding an assignment agreement, they first apply to an insurance company for damages, and they reimburse it, and this amount is more than the car lawyers give to the victims. Several years pass, and the assignee goes to court, where he provides an independent expert examination, according to which the damage from an accident is measured in completely different figures. This difference between insurance compensation and "real damage", according to the law, is recovered from the culprit of the accident. At the time of the trial, the real victim had his car repaired a long time ago, has no complaints and does not need new repairs. However, the legislation is designed in such a way that the court considers only the provided expertise and agrees with the claims.
Why do they charge huge sums for minor accidents?
Lyubov, one of those faced with the activities of such car lawyers, explained to Izvestia that immediately after the accident, the assignees contact the insurance company and conclude an agreement on the settlement of the insured event without conducting a technical examination. In this case, the insurance company calculates the payment according to the methodology of the Russian Union of Motor Insurers (RSA), taking into account the wear of the parts.
Then they bring to court the results of an independent expert examination, which is carried out according to the methodology of the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation. Here, the wear of spare parts is not taken into account, the amounts are charged as for new original spare parts, and the cost is taken into account at the time of the dispute. Therefore, lawsuits against the perpetrators of the accident come two or three years after the accident: by that time, all the details are significantly more expensive.
— The paradox of the situation is that the car has already been restored, in any case, money will not be spent on its repair, — says Lyubov. — They all go to the assignee.
The victims of road accidents who do not actually participate in this whole scheme may be affected later: information that the car was broken down so that repairs of 300-400 thousand rubles were needed (and not 50 thousand, as it was in reality), will be reflected in a variety of services and will reduce the cost of the car upon resale.. And Igor Morzharetto, a member of the presidium of the public council under the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation, says that some people also have to pay tax for this large amount received by the assignee.
Who participates in the scheme
In the Nizhny Novgorod region, several companies have mastered such a business, it follows from the materials of court cases. In addition to the already mentioned IP Kreiderman I.M., this is IP Tabakov S.V., who works in conjunction with an individual, Sergey Dmitrievich Vershinin. Tabakov enters into an assignment agreement with the victim and collects damages from the insurance company, and then transfers the rights to recover to Sergey Vershinin. He goes to court as an individual, demanding to reimburse the difference from the culprit of the accident. Those affected by the activities of car lawyers believe that this is how tax evasion and business fragmentation occur.
Nizhny Novgorod motorists consider Sergey Vershinin to be the key person in this whole scheme. He is 54 years old, he is a former employee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. As Izvestia found out, he owns 16 cars, which he rents to the emergency services. Thanks to this, he is gaining clients by buying out the right of assignment from his partners.
Nizhny Novgorod car lawyers almost always do an expert examination with the same independent expert, IP Shtonda D.S. This appraiser does not see the damaged car at all — the entire examination is compiled according to the inspection report from the accident site. Photos are not attached to the case. However, Nizhny Novgorod residents who contacted Izvestia note that often, according to the results of a forensic examination, the cost of repairs is not much cheaper, since it is still based on the cost of spare parts at the time of the dispute.
As Izvestia found out, there are similar cases all over Russia. According to one of the victims, several companies earn this way in Kazan. For example, Absolut LLC. The scheme is exactly the same, only the victims are not given cash, but 70-80% of the payment that can be obtained from the insurance company.
"But they charge the very minimum in insurance and only then, through the court, they knock out the rest of the money from the culprit of the accident, providing an expert assessment of the damage in several hundred thousand rubles," said one of the residents of Kazan, who asked not to be named.
Moreover, if in the Nizhny Novgorod region car lawyers have to go through several judicial instances and get their way only in cassation, in Kazan usually the district courts immediately side with the assignees.
Izvestia was unable to contact entrepreneurs Vershinin and Tabakov. It is known that after publications about Vershinin's activities began to appear in local media and social networks, Vershinin filed a lawsuit against one of the Nizhny Novgorod portals and three individuals (victims of his activities) for the protection of honor, dignity and business reputation and the recovery of moral damages in the amount of 500 million rubles.
Why do the courts satisfy the requirements
At the same time, the scheme itself, if you do not go into the details of specific situations, is legitimate. Sergey Radko, a lawyer for the Freedom of Choice movement, noted that it became possible after damage from road accidents increasingly began to be reimbursed as a cash payment for CTP, rather than repairs. And in 2017, the Constitutional Court of the Russian Federation adopted a resolution in which it recognized the victims' right to full compensation for damage, and not only taking into account wear and tear. Since then, a stable judicial practice has been formed to recover "full damage" directly from the perpetrator of the incident.
According to Izvestia's interlocutor, this has created an entire industry where "auto lawyers" literally arrive at the scene of an accident and sign a contract with the victim to assign the right of claim.
Dmitry Schneidman, a lawyer and senior partner at Belsky & Partners Law Firm, said that initially the cession scheme meant collecting additional insurance payments under the CTP policy. Claims were filed specifically against insurance companies for additional payment of the amount of compensation.
— When the number of such claims became significant, insurers found opposition to the scheme: the payment of insurance compensation to the victim began to be accompanied by the signing of loss settlement agreements, which implies the absence of property claims against the insurance company, — the lawyer told Izvestia. — And now the requirements for the insurer have changed to the requirements for the cause of the accident. This scheme is quite legal.
The expert of the direction "Popular Front. Analytics, lawyer, auto expert Ekaterina Solovyova emphasizes that here it is more likely to talk about abuse of law, but not about fraud.
"The real amount of damage is a right, and it arises regardless of the individual — not the assignee, so the victim has the right to claim this amount," she told Izvestia. — Now the difference that arises after partial compensation of the insurer is compensated by the culprit. But there is a chance that in the near future the obligation to pay will be imposed on insurers again, as it was before.
She noted that judicial practice is changing now and such precedents are emerging.
How to solve the problem
Nizhny Novgorod drivers wrote a lot of appeals to different authorities asking them to solve the problem, but they mostly received unsubscriptions. Only in one of the latest responses, the Ministry of Finance draws attention to the absurdity of the assignees' claims and writes that "if there are grounds for suspicion of illegal actions, for example, in cases of claims for repair of a vehicle that has already been restored after an accident or legally transferred to another owner, you should contact law enforcement agencies in in accordance with the established competence".
The Bank of Russia told Izvestia that they have information only about isolated similar situations.
"We do not see a systemic problem that would require amendments to the current legislation, which could lead, among other things, to restrictions on the rights of victims," the regulator's press service said. — In certain life circumstances, they may be interested in urgently receiving money to repair their car instead of waiting. For example, if we are talking about a car that is used as a taxi: every day of downtime for its owner can be expensive.
The Central Bank of the Russian Federation stressed that "professional assignees" will not have the opportunity to abuse their right if the courts comply with the principles of fairness and proportionality of responsibility for the violation.
Anatoly Aksakov, chairman of the State Duma Committee on Financial Markets, told Izvestia that his committee had also received similar requests, "but exclusively from residents of the Nizhny Novgorod region." All appeals were redirected by the committee to the Prosecutor General's Office. The deputy considers the behavior of car lawyers to be unscrupulous, but calls for the fact of abuse of law to be established in court.
— The issue has become more acute due to the existing problems in the organization by insurers of restoration repairs of vehicles damaged as a result of an accident, — he said. — Currently, a legislative initiative is being developed aimed at comprehensively regulating the issues of insurance compensation in the form of restoration repairs.
Sergey Radko believes that it is necessary to adopt special standards for assessing the cost of repairs and limit the way in which financial services assignment agreements are concluded, for example, to provide only a notarized form of the transaction or registration through the Gosuslugi portal.
— And also to introduce a cooling—off period when the victim will be able to cancel the contract after its execution — after all, such contracts are often drawn up at the scene immediately after an accident on a pre-printed letterhead of the "assistant", as a result of which the victim cannot always understand what all this means, - he said.
Sergey Efremov, Director of Asset Protection at RSA, also considers it advisable to notarize the assignment agreement. In addition, if the victim has signed a power of attorney to represent his interests, then he or his legal representative should receive compensation for the loss calculated by the insurance company, he added.
Sergey Radko emphasizes that it is necessary to resolve the situation when the court is adjudicated around an already repaired or even sold car, because then the cost of its repair determined by an expert does not matter.
— This requires clarification at the level of the Supreme Court, since the lower courts do not have a common understanding of this issue. Now the courts, as a rule, collect on expertise and do not take into account the fact of repairs," the source told Izvestia.
Interestingly, Nizhny Novgorod residents once won a court case against the assignee. Then it was recognized that the insurance indemnity had already proved to be appropriate. However, after that, all other court cases turned out to be in favor of the car lawyers. Even the visit to the court of the victims of the accident did not help, who reported that the car was repaired and did not need additional repairs: the courts considered them to have dropped out of legal relations and did not take into account the opinion.
Ekaterina Solovyova believes that it would also be necessary to take into account the time when the assignee acquired the right to foreclosure.: this may indicate the fact of abuse. Another option is to prohibit the assignee from overestimating the cost of repairs after they have already been made.
Igor Morzharetto adds that in regions where law enforcement agencies work with the insurance community, such problems are almost absent. And where there is no such cooperation, such companies feel great.
Izvestia also sent inquiries about the situation with car lawyers to the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation and the Prosecutor General's Office.
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