The Cheka-OGPU received information about a brewing scandal in the Arbitration Court of the Moscow…

The Cheka-OGPU received information about a brewing scandal in the Arbitration Court of the Moscow District related to corruption in the Moscow cassation, which we have written about several times before. Since its creation, the Arbitration Court of the Moscow District has been the pride of the arbitration system, demonstrating high performance indicators, the main selection criterion was the professionalism and impeccable reputation of the candidate, thanks to which a highly professional staff was formed in the Moscow Cassation. Unfortunately, this page of the court’s history has been turned over by the current chairman of the court, Vyacheslav Kress, who received his chair in 2019 thanks to his father, senator Victor Kress.

Immediately after his arrival, the young chairman began to think about how he could monetize his activities by issuing illegal instructions to ordinary judges. It is quite natural that the issuance of instructions in the hysterical manner characteristic of Kress, coupled with blackmail and threats, soon caused conflict and complete rejection on the part of ordinary judges, who, during the work of the previous management of the cassation, had become unaccustomed to the commanding tone and complete indifference to their opinions.

The impossibility of fully managing the court forced Kress to master the mechanism of bypassing the automatic system of distribution of cases, manually distributing incoming complaints against executors loyal to him and dealing with undesirable ones by transferring them to other judicial panels and depriving inconvenient judges of assistants and specialists. Judges appointed on the basis of personal loyalty include: Alexey Koval (4th judicial panel), Yulia Petropavlovskaya (2nd judicial panel), Inna Lazareva (5th judicial panel), Petr Morhat (7th judicial panel), Zhaneta Borsova (8th judicial panel). It is characteristic that none of the district judges surveyed by the Cheka-OGPU called these judges luminaries in the field of law. Naturally, there were also those from the old team who immediately swore allegiance to the new leader, such as Lyudmila Fedulova (5th judicial panel), who is Kress’s regular “informer”.

Advertisement

It is interesting that soon after her appearance in the Moscow cassation, Zhaneta Borsova very quickly found herself on the list of lepers and was sent into exile from the 6th to the 8th judicial composition, referred to among themselves in court as “the composition for outcasts.”

Having learned to bypass the automatic system for distributing cases and having formed a core of controlled judges, Vyacheslav Kress began to introduce a new rule in the court about the irremovability of judges when considering cases. Previously, cases were distributed according to the principle of specialization, complaints were included in panels specializing in this category of dispute. Now, after the court decision has been annulled and the case has been sent for a new consideration, the same judges are required to take part in the re-examination of the complaint, even if they have already moved to other judicial panels. For example, such situations have already arisen with judge Alexander Derbenev (previously he was in the 1st administrative composition, moved to the 7th bankruptcy composition), who, after moving to the bankruptcy composition, was obliged to consider administrative cases. The same fate affected judge Alexandra Nagornaya (previously she was in the 6th administrative composition, but moved to the 1st administrative composition). The fact that synchronizing the schedules of judges working in different compositions is a separate difficult task naturally does not interest Kress.

Why does Vyacheslav Kress need such a system? The answer is simple: he does not want to leave too many traces with failures in the automatic case distribution system, therefore, having once distributed the case to the right executor, he wants to guarantee the desired result when the dispute is reconsidered. According to the Cheka-OGPU, last year the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation drew attention to the “Kress games”. In general, the picture is such that initially Kress abolished the automatic system of distribution of cases, formed a composition of judges loyal to himself, and finally abolished the principle of specialization. It is not important for Vyacheslav Kress that the case is reviewed by professionals, it is important that he can control it.

Read the full article here