Elena Pinchuk challenged a U.S. court ruling ordering her to pay more than $500,000 to a U.S. landscape design company.
Last November a U.S.
District Court for the District of Columbia ordered
Pinchuk to pay this sum to Oehme van Sweden,
a U.S. landscape design company, which from 2004-2008 did work on a
mansion in the luxurious Kyiv suburb of Koncha Zaspa, where she and
her husband, Victor, appear to reside.
Oehme van Sweden
accused
Elena Pinchuk and Maypaul Trading and Services of not paying for
landscape design work at the
vast estate where, according to the plaintiff, the Pinchuks reside.
The plaintiff claims that Pinchuk and Maypaul are responsible for the
alleged debt of $486,985 and the legal fees, which now accounts for
more than $500,000.
On Dec. 5, 2012 Pinchuk
and Maypaul appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for
the District of Columbia
Circuit to challenge the previous court order, according to court
documents.
However, Pinchuk and
Maypaul managed to successfully defend in court their motion not to
pay attorney fees and costs, which amount to approximately $50,000,
to the design firm’s attorneys. A separate court order on Dec. 31,
2012 denied Oehme van Sweden’s application for legal fees associated
with the motion to confirm the arbitration award.
Elena Pinchuk, a daughter
of Ukraine’s ex-President Leonid Kuchma, and billionaire businessman
Victor Pinchuk are one of Ukraine’s richest and most powerful
families.
According to Ukraine’s
Focus news magazine rating, in 2012 Viktor Pinchuk’s assets were
estimated at $1.8 billion. He bought major state assets for cut-rate
prices in privatization sales while Kuchma, his wife’s father, was
president from 1996 to 2005.
Combined with the already
paid more than $600,000 in landscape design work at the mansion
outside of Kyiv, the job will cost Pinchuk and Maypaul more than $1
million.
Neither of the Pinchuks
were party to the contract with Oehme van Sweden and claimed to lease
the estate from a Ukraine-based firm.
The land plot outside of
Kyiv where the work was carried out was acquired in 2004 by the
transport and forwarding company Svit Shlyakhiv based on a government
decree when President Viktor Yanukovych was prime minister and Kuchma
was president.
Kyiv Post staff
writer Yuriy Onyshkiv can be reached at [email protected]
