A company member petitioned the Arbitration Court of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region to invalidate a 2017 extraordinary general meeting decision extending the General Director’s authority. The lawsuit was motivated by the fact that the protocol of the General Meeting contained a falsified signature of the signatory, who was not notified of the meeting and did not participate in it. The argument on the presumptive falsification of the signature on the protocol was based on the results of a handwriting examination conducted by the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Kalininsky District of St. Petersburg during the inspection of one of the plaintiff’s applications for a crime.
The lawsuit was filed simultaneously against the General Director and the other participants of the company who signed the disputed protocol. The company, which should have been a defendant in such a dispute according to the law, was brought in as a participant in the case of the court’s initiative.
During the consideration of the A56-95157/2020 case, presenting the interests of the defendants, we pointed to the probabilistic conclusion of the handwriting presented in the case, which cannot be based on a court decision (in its conclusions, it was only the assumption that the signature of the plaintiff is falsified on the protocol). In addition, we pointed to the one-year limitation period – as the claimant himself declared when considering the case, he learned about the contested decision in May 2019, while the lawsuit was brought to court only in October 2020.
Based on the results of the case, the court refused to satisfy the claims in full, noting the plaintiff’s missed deadline for challenging the decision of the meeting.
Subsequently, the decision was upheld by the courts of appellate and cassation instances, and court costs were recovered from the plaintiff in favor of each of the defendants.
