Synegor Law Firm ensured that the interests of the owner of one of the largest hotel complexes in the Kyiv region were protected

As part of criminal proceedings, the pre-trial investigation for which has been ongoing since 2019, the owner of an integral property complex has suffered an unlawful restriction of his rights to peaceful possession of the property. The hotel was seized with a prohibition on its use, and a decision was made to transfer the immovable property to the management of the National Agency of Ukraine for the Identification, Tracing and Management of Assets Derived from Corruption and Other Crimes.

The client only became aware of the court decision when representatives of ARMA appeared at the hotel reception with a ruling issued by an investigating judge of one of Kyiv’s district courts.

At this stage, the client sought legal assistance from the lawyers at Synegor Law Firm.

Following a thorough analysis of the facts of the case and the legal grounds on which the court decision was based, the team of lawyers, led by Rostyslav Salamakha, appealed to the court of appeal to overturn these manifestly unlawful and wholly disproportionate measures to secure the criminal proceedings. The Kyiv Court of Appeal upheld the position of the property owner’s representative and fully set aside the seizure and other prohibitions, noting that the property did not meet the criteria for material evidence as defined in Article 98 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of Ukraine.

However, the attempts by the pre-trial investigation authority did not cease. Despite the existing court ruling, which established the unlawfulness of both the seizure and the transfer of the property to a third-party administrator, the lead prosecutor in the criminal proceedings made several further attempts to remove the client’s management from running the hotel complex.

Given the obvious abuse of the procedural rights conferred on the prosecutor in criminal proceedings by the Code of Criminal Procedure of Ukraine, the lawyers at Synegor Law Firm involved inspectors from the Ukrainian Business Ombudsman’s Council in the process of countering the unlawful restriction of the client’s constitutional rights, lodged a complaint via the ‘Stop Pressure’ portal for the protection of businesses against unlawful pressure, and united the efforts of all representatives of property owners in Ukraine’s hotel and leisure sector, whose rights were also under threat in these criminal proceedings.

It was only by applying a comprehensive set of measures to counter the prosecutor’s unfounded encroachments that we managed to halt further attempts to restrict the owner’s rights to the hotel’s entire property complex. “Increasingly, creative approaches are required to achieve the goal of protecting a client’s legitimate interests. Judges do not expect clichéd quotations from the Code of Criminal Procedure of Ukraine or excerpts from ECtHR judgments, but rather lively, structured argumentation. Be compelling and do not lose the court’s attention until you have achieved that crucial effect – ‘being heard by the court’ – Rostyslav Salamakha.