The court of general jurisdiction decided in favor of our client to recover the debt in the amount of 24.2 million rubles from the debtor and his guarantor under the lease agreement with a purchase option and immediately foreclosed on the pledged property.

Our principal leased the movable property - cattle and agricultural equipment for 11 months giving the tenant the opportunity to purchase the equipment, including its purchase price in the leased payments in advance. Surety and pledge agreements were entered into with other legal entities and individuals to ensure that the lessee fulfills his payment obligations.

The lessee did not make any payment under the agreement, did not returned the property, and the two-year negotiations on a peaceful settlement of the dispute were not successful.

We filed a lawsuit in December 2019, requested interim measures in the form of seizure of the funds of the debtor, the guarantor and the pledgor. We used the opportunity to file an application for enforcement proceedings at the location of the debtor's property to simplify the control over the course of enforcement proceedings, since the debtor was registered in the European part of Russia. We have initiated enforcement proceedings in Novosibirsk, at the place of opening bank accounts. This procedure was implemented despite the active resistance of the bailiff service to conduct proceedings under an atypical procedure.

The defendants, the debtor and his guarantor chose a passive, if not "dead" tactic. While we and the court tried to notify them of the dispute - the documents were not received intentionally, the legal entity did not fulfill the obligation to receive postal correspondence. But the plan did not work, the notification was recognized by the court as appropriate and the claim was considered on its merits.

As a general rule, property transferred under a lease agreement with the purchase option is subject to return to the lessor in such disputes. However, we were able to convince the court with arguments based on the practice of the decision enforcement on disputes with cattle, focusing the court's attention on all the risks and difficulties of subsequent enforcement of the court's decision to return such short-lived property.

As a result, we managed to recover the cost of the property that was previously the subject of the lease, and foreclose on other property pledged in favor of our principal.