Puzzle picture: The Supreme Court will consider the case of the gallery owner's receipt for $10 million

On February 5, the Judicial Board for Criminal Cases of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation should put an end to the confrontation between gallery owner Andrey Eremin and businessman Konstantin Vachevsky, which has been going on for 12 years. According to the case file, the businessman is trying to recover $ 10 million from Yeremin on a receipt that was previously recognized as fake by several examinations. At the same time, Vachevsky has already been convicted of falsifying the same debt for almost five years. Now, the Supreme Court must decide whether the receipt was real: now, in civil proceedings, the document is considered authentic, and in criminal proceedings, it is a fiction. This situation sets a dangerous precedent for the entire Russian judicial system, experts stressed. The details of the case are in the Izvestia article.

How the receipt appeared

On Thursday, February 5, the Judicial Board for Criminal Cases of the Supreme Court will consider the cassation appeal of businessman Konstantin Vachevsky. He is trying to challenge his conviction for attempted fraud in an attempt to recover $10 million on a forged receipt from art critic Andrei Eremin.

In the case file of the Kirovsky District Court of Khabarovsk (available to Izvestia) It is alleged that in 2014, Vachevsky planned to deceive his friend Andrei Eremin. To do this, he wrote a fake receipt stating that the art critic was borrowing $10 million from the entrepreneur for a month. And then Vachevsky filed a lawsuit in a civil court to recover 346.5 million rubles from Yeremin to repay the debt.

"Then Vachevsky, continuing his criminal intent, knowing for sure that his acquaintance would be abroad for a long time since June 2014, personally appeared at the Khimki court," the case file says. "The judge of the Khimki court, who was unaware of Wachevsky's criminal intentions, ruled in his favor."

An expert examination was ordered in the framework of the civil case. Experts, including experts from the Ministry of Justice, confirmed that the signature on the receipt belongs to Yeremin.

After that, bailiffs began enforcement proceedings. By that time, the art critic had returned to Moscow and filed a statement against the Vachevskys, a criminal case was opened, and the court's decision was appealed.

In court, Vachevsky stated that Eremin offered him to earn money, and for this, to lend him $ 10 million. With this money, he was going to buy a painting, which he planned to resell for more. For this, Eremin allegedly promised him a percentage of the deal. Vachevsky transferred the money in several tranches of $2 million each.

"One of the meetings, at which he handed him another $2 million, took place in the fall of 2013 at the Vachevsky office. Eremin drove up and called him. He took the money out of his safe and asked the secretary to pack it in dry—cleaning bags," the court documents say. "After the last transfer of money, Yeremin gave him one in return for the four receipts he had written."

At the same time, a paradoxical situation arose: in the civil trial in Khimki, the receipt was considered real, and in Khabarovsk, the investigation began to formalize it as an "instrument of crime."

In 2018, the Kirovsky District Court of Khabarovsk sentenced the Vachevskys. According to him, the receipt was recognized as fiction, and the attempt to recover money from it was an attempt at fraud. The businessman received 4.5 years in prison, the term was found to have been served due to his stay in jail. After the release of the Vachevskys, he went abroad.

Why did the Supreme Court intervene

Expert opinions have become the main stumbling block. As part of the criminal case, experts from the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the FSB claimed that the signature on the receipt did not belong to Andrey Yeremin. However, in 2019, the Khimki City Court refused to review the art historian's civil decision on debt collection due to newly discovered circumstances. This was done despite the existence of a guilty verdict against the Vachevskys.

On January 15, 2021, the Supreme Court also dismissed Yeremin's complaint in a civil case, effectively confirming the legality of debt collection.

During the retrial in 2022, a new commission examination was appointed at the Institute of Criminology of the FSB of Russia. The experts were presented with a larger number of samples of the victim's signature, including those made before 2010. After studying them, the experts recognized the conclusions of their colleagues from 2017 as erroneous. A new study has confirmed that Eremin signed the document, but it was probably done before 2010, that is, even before he met the Vachevskys. The Khabarovsk Regional Court, upon reconsideration of the appeal, left the verdict of the Vachevskys for the forged receipt unchanged.

In its ruling on the Wachevsky appeal, the Supreme Court pointed out the inadmissibility of "legal dualism." According to the position of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, two opposing judicial acts cannot simultaneously exist in the legal system: one recognizing the debt as legitimate, and the second calling the same requirement a crime.

Now the Vachevsky criminal case has been sent for consideration to the Judicial Board for Criminal Cases of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation.

What will be the Supreme Court's decision?

The circumstances established by the court, including in the framework of civil proceedings under a decision that has entered into force, do not require additional verification when considering a criminal case, Anna Golub, partner at Criminal Defense Firm, reminded Izvestia.

"Based on the materials presented, the conclusions of the courts are contradictory, since both processes involve a receipt that served as the basis for applying to the court and law enforcement agencies," she said. — If we assume that in the framework of the civil procedure, the court established that the receipt was not a forged document and based on this fact, the plaintiff received the right to receive funds from the defendant, then he should not have been prosecuted in the criminal case.

However, it is possible that the court could have been misled, and therefore an expert examination is being conducted once again in the framework of the criminal case, the lawyer added. And it was the handwriting and technical and forensic examinations that were supposed to put an end to this issue.

— But there were several examinations, and some spoke in favor of the accused, others did not, — said the expert. — The assessment of evidence is the competence of the court, and the decision is made according to the internal conviction of the court, based on the totality of evidence. Thus, there is a conflict of decisions, one of them should be canceled.

According to Alexey Gavrishev, lawyer and managing partner of AVG Legal, for the first time in a long time, the Supreme Court is very rigidly and consistently based on the principle of consistency of judicial acts.

—In the Vachevsky case, there are simultaneously decisions of civil courts that have entered into force, which recognize the existence of debt and the authenticity of the receipt, and a guilty verdict in a criminal case, which essentially proceeds from the opposite — that the receipt is fictitious and the debt is fictitious," he said. — This is a red line for the Supreme Court. He says it bluntly: This cannot be the case, the legal system cannot simultaneously consider the same fact to be both existing and non-existent.

The Supreme Court, according to the expert, will not make the final decision itself, but will confirm that the cassation is obliged to re-examine the case.

— And here the Supreme Court actually hints to the lower courts that the "choice of a convenient examination" and the concealment of inconvenient conclusions no longer take place, — Alexey Gavrishev pointed out.

Sofya Lukinova, head of the Legal Department of VMT Consult, believes that it is highly likely that the Supreme Court will cancel the cassation ruling.

"The cassation instance, in fact, allowed a substitution of logic: instead of checking the legality of the criminal verdict, a formal argument was used about the existence of a civil decision that had entered into force, which was taken without taking into account the fact of forgery and before the conviction," she added. — This approach creates the risk of two parallel judicial realities.

That is why the most likely decision of the Supreme Court will be to keep the conviction in force, the expert noted.