A road passes through the territory of the gardening association, for the use of which the association has concluded a land lease agreement. Several years after the conclusion of the lease agreement, the legal entity-lessor was declared bankrupt, and its property was sold at auction. The new owner of the land plot, a collection company, took advantage of the right to increase the rent under the contract and raised it almost thirty times at once. After the association refused to pay such an amount, the new owner went to court.
The Arbitration Court of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region, in its decision in case А56-113484/2021, agreed that the lessor under the contract had the right to increase the rent once every two years, and that the contract does not establish limits for the increase, so the notice sent to the lessee about the increase in rent is lawful. We did not agree with this formalistic approach and appealed this decision to the Thirteenth Arbitration Court of Appeal.
After considering our appeal, the appellate court agreed with our arguments that the disputed phrase in the contract that the lessor can revise the amount of rent does not give the lessor the opportunity to uncontrollably increase the amount of rent. Therefore, the appellate court recovered the debt at the rate excluding the unilateral increase in the fee, reducing the amount of recovery from 363 thousand rubles to 13 thousand rubles. The appellate decision was upheld during consideration in the cassation instance; the lessor’s complaint was also rejected by the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation.
