The company under several contracts performed a set of works for the customer to prepare for drilling water wells and develop relevant projects. For all contracts, except one, the work was accepted and paid for. The customer refused to accept the work only for the site for which they could not obtain drilling permits in the established order.
We applied to the Arbitration Court of the city of Moscow with a demand to recover the debt for the work performed. In the response to the claim, the customer indicated that they failed to pass the licensing for the prepared project, since for this land plot they, as it turned out, did not have definitively formalized ownership rights. The contractor was supposed to check this before the start of execution under the contract, and since they did not do this, they are responsible for this. In this regard, the customer filed a counterclaim for the recovery of penalties. We presented evidence that this circumstance was beyond the scope of the contractual responsibility of our client and that during the execution of the contract, the client repeatedly contacted the customer regarding the provision of documentation, suspended execution due to the lack of documentation, and that the customer themselves decided to try to pass the licensing without a full package of documents.
The arbitration court agreed with our arguments, fully satisfying the contractor’s claim and refusing the customer’s counterclaim. Based on the results of the consideration of the customer’s appeal, the Ninth Arbitration Court of Appeal supported these arguments, additionally pointing to the general context of the fulfillment of contractual obligations by our client to the customer – the fact that a large number of other contracts have been accepted without comments, testifies to the professional and high-quality performance of similar obligations in those cases where the customer provides the contractor with the necessary assistance. Therefore, the appellate court did not find grounds for revising the decision, which has come into legal force.
