A company engaged in the construction of seagoing vessels ordered equipment from a subcontractor to equip a seagoing vessel supplied under a state defense order contract to a state customer. Since the equipment was not delivered on time, the company demanded the return of the unspent advance. The subcontractor, without disputing the violation of the deadlines and the impossibility of delivering the equipment, refused to return the advance, citing the company’s debt for goods supplied under another contract. Regarding the existence of counter-property claims under the first and second contracts, the subcontractor drew up an act of set-off, under which he wrote off most of the amount to be returned under the first contract for undelivered equipment.
The company applied to the Arbitration Court of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region with demands for the recovery of the debt in full, without reducing it by the amount of the set-off. During the consideration of case No. А56-97752/2022, we managed to defend the legal position according to which a special payment regime using special accounts is provided for the execution of contracts concluded as part of the implementation of the state defense order, which makes the general rules of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation on offsets inapplicable to this kind of contract, according to which for an offset it is enough to have counter-property claims and the will of one of the parties to repay them at the expense of each other. The court agreed with our arguments and by the decision of August 10, 2023, recognized the offset made by the subcontractor as void and satisfied the claims of our client.
By the resolutions of the Thirteenth Arbitration Court of Appeal of January 8, 2024 and the Arbitration Court of the Northwestern District of March 18, 2024, the court’s decision was upheld.
