The Central Court of Chelyabinsk satisfied the claim of the Prosecutor General's Office to convert the assets of the Makfa company into state income, RBC reports with reference to lawyer Pavel Khlustov.
“With the decision of "Makfa" I strongly disagree and intend to appeal it in the near future. In addition, there are grounds for appealing to the Constitutional Court,” he said.
According to Khlustov, “to talk about the final nationalization of Makfa” It’s still premature,” since this is only a decision of the first instance. At the same time, the Prosecutor General's Office asked for immediate execution of the decision, so the current owners of the company have already lost control over it.
The court arrested 100% of the shares of Makfa itself, as well as the companies First Bread Factory, Smak, New Five-Year Plan, Dolgovskoye and other enterprises for a total amount of 100 trillion rubles. At the same time, Khlustov calls this amount “the creativity of the bailiff.” According to him, the seized property is estimated at 46 billion rubles.
Before the decision, Makfa proposed a settlement agreement, under which “the current owner would buy the enterprise, and the state would take over its management.” In addition, the company promised to send a billion rubles annually “for charitable purposes related to a special military operation.”
The Prosecutor General's Office filed a lawsuit for the nationalization of Makfa shares in the Chelyabinsk court at the end of March. Kommersant wrote that, according to the department, the company and “a dozen other enterprises” are of “corrupt origin”, since their beneficiaries — former State Duma deputy Vadim Belousov and ex-governor of the Chelyabinsk region Mikhail Yurevich — were engaged in business using their “high position in power.»
According to the Prosecutor General's Office, Belousov and Yurevich did not inform the control authorities that they actually owned McFoy. They transferred assets to trustees and “created a false appearance of distance from business projects.”
Belousov was sentenced in 2022 to 10 years in a maximum security colony in absentia in the case of a bribe of three billion rubles. A year later the sentence was overturned. Yurevich was also accused in a bribery case. Both are on the international wanted list.
Makfa is the largest Russian manufacturer of pasta. The company has enterprises in the Chelyabinsk, Sverdlovsk and Kurgan regions, as well as in the Altai and Stavropol territories.
In April 2023, Putin allowed the state to take shares of foreign companies “connected” with countries where Russian assets were blocked . The first to be placed under “temporary management” were the branches of the German Uniper and the Finnish Fortum. Later this affected the Baltika company, part of the Carlsberg beer holding, the Russian branch of Danone, the Rolf car dealer, the Ulyanovsk Machine Tool Plant, and divisions of Bosch and Ariston.
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