The Arbitration Court of the Moscow Region published the operative part of the decision on the claim of the tax service (FTS) against the Russian legal entity IKEA — Torg LLC. RBC and Kommersant drew attention to this.
At the end of April, 12.922 billion rubles were recovered from the Russian subsidiary of IKEA in favor of Russia for this claim, but the details of the decision were not known.
The Federal Tax Service challenged the IKEA deal after their withdrawal from the Russian market due to the war. In November 2022, the inventory of goods from Torg was purchased by the Yandex.Market legal entity, the Market.Trade company. IKEA products were then sold on the marketplace.
Payment for this transaction was transferred to the accounts of IKEA's Irish subsidiary, Fami Limited, in Raiffeisenbank and UniCredit Bank, since Torg formally had a debt to it.< /p>
The Federal Tax Service believes that the IKEA subsidiary hid the real purpose of the payments, and, in accordance with the restrictions introduced after the start of the war, in order to withdraw money abroad, it had to obtain permission from a government commission.
The arbitration court considered the deal “anti-social” and therefore invalid, and also decided to recover the entire amount from the IKEA subsidiary.
“Article 169 [of the Civil Code] indicates that the qualifying feature of an antisocial transaction is its purpose, i.e. achieving a result that not only does not comply with the law or moral standards, but contradicts — obviously and obviously for participants in civil transactions — the foundations of law and order and morality,” the resolution says.
On March 3, 2022, IKEA suspended work in Russia and Belarus due to the war in Ukraine. At the same time, employees continued to be paid wages for several months. In June 2022, IKEA announced its decision to sell all its factories in Russia, and company employees were informed of layoffs. In July-August they held an online sale of goods. A year later, in September 2023, Gazprombank bought the Mega shopping centers from them.