Source The court exacted 60 million rubles from her. This is the amount of expenses of a partner of a Swedish company for an unfinished interchange to a shopping center near St. Petersburg. On December 20, the Arbitration Court of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region satisfied the claim of the Northern Research Institute of Hydraulic Engineering and Land Reclamation (SevNIIGiM) in the amount of 60.4 million rubles. to Ingka Centers Rus Property E, follows from his decision. The latter is part of the Ingka Centers holding, which owns the IKEA and Mega complexes.
As follows from the materials of the case, the plaintiff bought from the institute six years ago for 2.25 billion rubles. a 40-hectare plot between Krasnoselskoye Highway and the Ring Road in the Leningrad Region. On this site, he planned to build a shopping and entertainment center “Mega.Novosele” (together with IKEA) on approximately 220,000 sq. Ingka Centers intended to open this facility in 2021, but a year earlier, due to a change in strategy, it decided to abandon the project.
SevNIIGiM acted as a partner of the Swedish company in this complex: it was supposed to develop a road junction project. According to the terms of the contract, Ingka Centers Russia borne the cost of designing, but both parties were obliged to finance the construction of the facility. After the refusal to build the complex, the institute went to court demanding compensation for damages for the work carried out in the amount of 60 million rubles. The representative of the defendant, as follows from the case file, drew attention to the fact that the co-investment agreement was never concluded. But at the same time, Ingka Centers continued to correspond with the partner, approving the progress in preparing the interchange project until the beginning of 2020. As a result, the court took the side of the design institute. His representative could not be reached for comment. A representative of Ingka Centers Russia declined to comment on the trial.
If the company incurred the costs of implementing the project under a co-investment agreement, then it is quite logical that they should be compensated, says Dmitry Galantsev, managing partner of the Propositum Law Office. In this case, Ingka Centers acted in bad faith, misleading the counterparty, Vyacheslav Klimov, a lawyer at the Asterisk law firm, agrees. Both of them believe that the Swedish company will not be able to challenge this decision in the appellate and cassation instances.
Ingka Centers Russia operates a network of 14 Mega shopping and entertainment centers in 11 Russian cities. In March, the company temporarily closed IKEA stores. And in the summer it became known that she began to look for buyers for four factories in Russia. In addition to this, IKEA has reduced staff and has begun selling off inventory and closing stores. Now there is a liquidation of the legal entity “IKEA Dom”, which was responsible for the development of the retail network. At the same time, according to a representative of Ingka Centers Russia, there are no plans to close the existing Megas.
The complex on Krasnoselskoye Highway in the Leningrad Region is not the only project that Ingka Centers Russia has refused. In 2021, the company said that due to a change in strategy, it would not build a shopping center in Chelyabinsk. This year, she froze the work of the second phase of Mega in Yekaterinburg, the E1 edition wrote.
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