The High Court granted summary judgment of $1,432,324 to a plaintiff seeking to enforce a Russian judgment, after finding that the defendant had not proved his claims that signatures on key documents were forged or that there had been corruption in the Russian court process.
Mr Justice Binchy’s judgment, delivered on 12 March 2019, followed a plenary hearing limited to two questions: whether the defendant’s signatures on three specified 2007 documents were forged, and whether there were irregularities in the presentation of material about his presence in Russia to the Moscow City Court.
The Russian judgment had been made in the plaintiff’s favour for the same amount. The defendant had appeared and been legally represented in the Russian proceedings, and had brought a counterclaim. The Irish case began with the plaintiff’s application for summary judgment based on that foreign judgment. The defendant resisted enforcement by alleging forgery and irregularities, including that his international passport had been available to the first-instance Russian court but was missing from the appeal file.
The plaintiff said the disputed documents recorded a debt and its assignment to him. He and a witness, Mr Grinyuk, testified that the documents, although dated 3, 4 and 5 March 2007, were signed at the plaintiff’s Moscow office on 3 March. The defendant said he had left Russia on a flight that morning and could not have attended. The judgment records that the defendant’s passport showed he was in Russia on 2 and 3 March; the court also found that his account of his conference attendance and his connection with Antep Group changed under cross-examination.
The handwriting evidence was not conclusive. Three experts’ reports nevertheless contained findings that, in the judge’s assessment, supported the plaintiff’s account. The judge also relied on the documents’ inclusion of the defendant’s passport and Irish immigration card numbers, for which the defendant had no explanation.
On the passport issue, the judge found the defendant’s evidence did not establish even a prima facie case of corruption in the appeal proceedings. The defendant had said he sent an electronic passport copy to his lawyers, but the judgment records that neither Russian court file contained a copy.
The court concluded, on the balance of probabilities, that the disputed signatures were the defendant’s and that there was no evidence of corruption. It granted summary judgment for $1,432,324. The judgment states that the Irish hearing was confined to those issues; it did not determine the wider circumstances of the alleged loans.