The contract for delivery of couplings and adapters to them was concluded between the supplier of import accessories for special equipment having applied to us for juridical assistance and one of the structures of big state-owned corporation in April of 2018. Due to a number of reasons the product was delivered with delay, moreover, in three weeks after product receiving the buyer detected that a part of it didn’t meet the drawings. The Parties agreed the term for product replacement; the product was replaced within the specified term. Nevertheless, the buyer applied to the Arbitration Court of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region with the suit for recovery of forfeit for delivery delay from the supplier.
The forfeit amount claimed by the buyer for recover was 19,595.10 EUR. The buyer demanded to recover forfeit accrued on the cost of all products without considering those ones, which were delivered with delay, but were not subject to replacement. The claimant motivated the claim by the fact that based on functional and technical properties the couplings delivered without adapters could not be used, and due to this fact they were not of consumption value till replacement of the unsuitable adapters.
The Arbitration Court satisfied the claim of the buyer only partially. We managed to assure the court that accrual of forfeit on the cost of all products was in contradiction with the contract, and the delivered products were not a set. Particularly, not only absence of the indication to the set in the contract, but also the fact that the buyer purchased similar couplings previously without adapters witnessed about this fact. Moreover, the court accepted our submissions that the claimant previously accepted the products without complaints, and only in 24 days it applied to the supplier with the request about its replacement, thus, contributing to increase of forfeit amount, therefore, these 24 days shall not be considered in the forfeit calculation as per art. 404 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation.
The thirteenth arbitration appeal court as per our complaint changed the decision of the trial jurisdiction having corrected the arithmetic error and more reduced the forfeit.
Finally the suit of the buyer was satisfied only by 21.11%.
