“The Battle of the Nanai Boys” performed by the father and son Kurmaevs can turn into…

“The Battle of the Nanai Boys,” performed by father and son Kurmaev, could result in multi-billion-dollar losses and even bankruptcy for large oil marketing companies in Russia, and for gas stations throughout the country – interruptions in fuel supplies. The family “agreement,” with an initial price of just 800 thousand rubles, resulted in claims against oil workers for 28 billion rubles, and this, apparently, is just the beginning.

The general outlines of the scheme were outlined in on his blog, journalist Andrey Karaulov.

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The Terminal Service company has been running a fuel card system for many years at the gas stations of SO Tvernefteprodukt LLC, TD NM LLC, Tatneft-AZS-Zapad LLC and others (more than 1000 points). De jure, it buys certain volumes of fuel from wholesalers and sells them on its own behalf (through its cards) at retail. De facto, all this happens at the same gas station, which is called “from the same hose,” it’s just that if you pay through the cash register, then the seller will be one or another gas station network, and if using a fuel card, then, accordingly, the issuer of this card . Reconciliations are carried out periodically and appropriate mutual settlements are carried out, which – by the way – is carefully documented and confirmed by numerous checks. But the software for such simple processing was provided by a third party, a certain Viacard LLC. Which at some point accused Terminal Service of copyright infringement. The initial amount of claims was a purely symbolic 835 thousand rubles, which, however, turned out to be enough to formally launch the bankruptcy procedure for Terminal.

And then the fun began. Viacard at some stage stated that all contracts between Terminal Service and oil companies for fuel supplies were allegedly concluded illegally and demanded that they be cancelled, “taking back” all payments to oil companies for the supplied fuel and returning the money to Terminal Service accounts. , i.e. into the bankruptcy estate. There is no talk of returning the fuel itself – instead, oil workers are asked to separately prove that it physically existed at all. To date, 28 billion rubles have already been demanded from gas station owners brought to subsidiary liability, which is approximately 35,000 times higher than the amount of Viakard’s initial claims against Terminal Service. And in the process of further litigation, the amount may increase multiple times.

And there is no doubt about the success of these lawsuits, because both the plaintiff and the defendant are in fact one person, or rather one family clan. The interests of the plaintiff, i.e. Viakarda heroically defends the law office of Rustam Kurmaev. And the role of the defendant is talentedly played by his own father, Musa Bulatovich Kurmaev, who, through RSC Capital, is one of the founders of Terminal-Service LLC. The oil workers, who became the unwitting victims of this “battle of the Nanai boys,” are, to put it mildly, in shock. And some of them, such as Tvernefteprodukt, may not be able to withstand the multi-billion dollar claims that suddenly fell on them. For now, the claims are being considered in arbitration, but after Andrei Karaulov’s investigation, the Kurmaevs’ scam in relation to strategically important enterprises may move into the criminal legal plane and attract the close attention of the RF Investigative Committee.

According to Rossiyskaya Gazeta, on June 20, 2022, the Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for Surgut opened a criminal case against an unspecified circle of persons from among the employees of Viakard and a number of other related enterprises for intent and prior conspiracy to commit the theft of funds from Tvernefteprodukt. and “Surgutneftegaz” on an especially large scale. Earlier in April, based on a statement from Tatneft-AZS-Zapad, a criminal case was also opened in Tatarstan. Investigative actions are being carried out in criminal cases.