Advocate Bureau "Pleshakov, Ushkalov and partners"

V.S. Pleshakov, Managing Partner and V.N. Ushkalov, Partner have been practicing law since 1991 and in 1995 having obtained the qualification of attorneys and joined the Moscow Board of attorneys №1 set up a Legal Consultancy Office №4. Later it was reorganized into Pleshakov, Ushkalov & Partners, Attorneys At Law the partners of which in the same year joined the Moscow Attorneys Chamber. Today attorney services and legal support of activities of organizations are the main lines of business of the Firm. Since the establishment of the Firm its attorneys and lawyers have gained extensive experience in representing our clients’ interests in litigation of varying degrees of complexity in courts of various jurisdiction, resolving disputes in the field of corporate and tax law including ones in the Baltic states, CIS and other foreign countries.

All attorneys and lawyers of Pleshakov, Ushkalov & Partners, Attorneys At Law graduated from the Moscow State University named after M.V. Lomonosov (MGU). The Firm is consulted by leading professors and teachers from the legal department of MGU named after M.V. Lomonosov, the Private Law Research Center and other leading Russian higher education establishments. The partners of the Firm teach at the Chair of Civil Law of the Department of Law of MGU. The Firm’s attorneys successfully protected their clients’ interests in arbitrazh courts (arbitrazh courts of Moscow, Moscow province and other entities within the Russian Federation, federal district courts and Presidium of the Supreme Arbitrazh Court of the Russian Federation) and general jurisdiction courts.

"Since 2002 our attorneys and lawyers have been successfully consulting Russian and foreign businessmen on countermeasures against hostile takeovers, - says Vladimir Sergeevich Pleshakov. - Thus, we managed to protect in the Moscow Arbitrazh Court and Moscow Province Arbitrazh Court interests of a Moscow bank which was taken over by a group of persons in December 2004 using fabricated documents. We returned a multistory building located in Krasnoyarsk fraudulently re-registered to the names of front parties in 2004 o its lawful owners. We consulted owners of a trading house Zelenograd taken over in 2003 by a group of persons subsequently convicted according to Part 3 of Article 159 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. A considerable part of our work is dedicated to cases relating to illegal seizure or redistribution of property. Many of those cases one way or another are caused by gaps in the land law that provoke many problems including raiders.
Not long ago we defended a client in a dispute over land ownership in court in which neither the plaintiff nor the defendant knew exactly where the land plot was situated. It happened because of negligence in the land ownership registration. In or case the plaintiffs (a raider company) learnt that the land ownership documents of the land holder were registered with negligence and brought a case before the court. In the beginning of 1990-s there existed no cadastral numbers; there were just plans or location maps. But in this case everything somehow "miraculously" coincided: the basement where the files of the Russian Immovable Property Department for the Ruza District of the Moscow Province were kept was completely destroyed by flood while at that time in that district there was a burst of raider attacks. Each plot should have its cadastral number, but it often turns out that plots are assigned nominal cadastral numbers. Due to that reason not real land plots but phantoms are often sold. And in a large number of transactions certificates bear that particular number– just zeroes. That "phantom" gives the endless room for abuse and raiding. However the law enforcement agencies have lately been interfering in such cases more proactively. But likewise in the past large corporations able to engage highly qualified attorneys are better protected. Small businesses are almost defenseless. Almost all laws adopted in this latest decade protect interest of large businesses but for small and medium size businesses such protection is completely insufficient".

You do win cases in court, does it mean that regulatory mechanisms ensuring protection exist?

Certainly, yes. But there is one peculiar feature: now these mechanisms are constructed in such a way that they create much more complications for the owner than for criminals. The ownership protection mechanism is still very imperfect.

But a change of owner may result in a more efficient management and may be raiding is not always evil?

I believe that in no way a transfer to a more efficient management should be carried out in an unlawful manner. Lawful ways to acquire shares, initiation of court proceedings should be improved so that a bankruptcy results in a transfer of management to creditors, to more efficient owners.

Another source of problems is that laws are underdeveloped. Very often wording of laws is so bad and confusing it is impossible to work with it without additional development and clarification. Often resolving one issue lawmakers create a lot of other problems, while protecting interests of one government agency they complicate the life of all others.

Vladimir Sergeevich Pleshakov, Managing Partner.

Mr. Pleshakov graduated cum laude from MGU, Law Department. He has been a Member of the Moscow Attorneys Chamber since 1995. For a long time Mr. Pleshakov had been holding various executive positions at the USSR civil aviation agencies. From 1991 to 1996 he had been the head of BOREY, a law firm. Since 1996 he has been managing the attorney firm and teaching civil law at MGU Law Department.

by Natalya Safronova