Lawyers proved the fact of discrimination against the stevedore by the State Property Fund

Ukrainian lawyers proved that the rent was overestimated as a result of discrimination against the port operator by the State Property Fund.

The Court of Appeals confirmed the findings of the Antimonopoly Committee in the case of violation of economic competition by authorized state authorities. As a result, the stevedore was forced to pay inflated rent for the use of state property for a long time.

The port operator turned to lawyers with a request to resolve a complex dispute regarding payment for leased state property. As it turned out, for several years in a row, the authorized state authorities delayed the extension of the lease agreement. At the end of the term of the contract, the stevedore was offered an extremely inflated rental rate, which was three times the economically justified level.

Having actually found himself on the verge of losing business due to the risks of termination of the contract, the stevedore was forced to accept the unprofitable amount of lease payments and their payment over a long period of time, the press service of Legrant reported.

In order to protect the interests of the port operator, the lawyers turned to the Antimonopoly Committee. The committee established that the authorized authorities, in particular, the territorial branch of the Federal State University, violated the legislation on economic competition during the extension of the contract. The authorities appealed the decision in court, but the Commercial Court of the city of Kyiv confirmed the legality and reasonableness of the decision of the Antimonopoly Committee in favor of the port operator. Now the appellate court has reached similar conclusions.

“Undoubtedly, this is a precedent case for the entire port business. For the first time in the history of the industry, we managed to revise the rent, proving the violation of economic competition and the discriminatory approach on the part of the authorized state authorities,” commented Tetyana Titarenko, managing partner of Legrant.

According to her, it is also critically important that the court not only emphasized the inadmissibility of discrimination by the port operator, but also recognized the coercive nature of the stevedore’s agreement to pay the rent and the economically unjustified inflated rate. Such an approach will allow the case to be transferred to the applied plane of compensating the stevedore for damages, which amount to tens of millions of hryvnias.