The issue: the Ukrainian state company provided almost USD 2 million to a state repair plant to jointly fulfill its contract for the repair of military equipment for a third party – a Middle Eastern country. Due to the revolution in the country, the project was frozen for an indefinite period, but the repair plant refused to return the funds, referring to the fact that this was not provided for in the contract. After several years of such stagnation of the project, the client and its legal department already considered the debt hopeless.
Solution:
There were two significant problems that had to be solved by lawyer Dmytro Tytarenko:
• the contract between the client and the state-owned plant did not foresee a situation where the foreign customer would stop cooperation and does not complete the order, that is, the investor had no right to demand the return of the investments made and no grounds to sue the debtor;
• the client left the situation in limbo for more than five years, i.e., even if he went to court, there was a threat of losing because of the statute of limitations.
Lawyer Dmytro Tytarenko developed a strategy for solving this case for the client, which turned out to be successful thanks to the following professional implementation in the commercial court together with lawyers from the client’s legal department. The client’s contract with the debtor was terminated in court on the basis of Article 652 of the Civil Code of Ukraine, that is, in connection with a significant change in circumstances. Among them the court recognized revolutionary events in the customer’s foreign country and the introduction of an international embargo on military cooperation with it. Since the repair plant did not have time to actually begin the implementation of the international contract, upon termination of the contract, most of the funds received by it were collected by the court in favor of the claimant.

• CLIENT State company
• INDUSTRY International cooperation