Elena Pinchuk has been ordered to pay more than $500,000 to 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, a U.S.
landscape design firm, 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
Elena Pinchuk and Maypaul are responsible for the alleged debt of
$486,985 and the legal fees, which now accounts for more than
$500,000.
The U.S. District Court
for the District of Columbia on Nov. 6 granted the petitioner, Oehme
van Sweden, its motion that Pinchuk and Maypaul are responsible for
the debt.
The lawsuit against
Pinchuk and Cyprus-based Maypaul was filed in
January and was aimed to confirm the last year’s arbitration decision
by the International Centre for
Dispute Resolution, an international arm of the American Arbitration
Association. The court confirmed the arbitration award against
Maypaul and Elena Pinchuk in its entirety and denied the respondents’
motion to dismiss the case.
Neither Pinchuk nor her
U.S. lawyers responded to Kyiv Post’s emailed questions.
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.
Paul Thaler, a lawyer for
the petitioner Oehme van Sweden, told the Kyiv Post that Pinchuk and
Maypaul may resist and try to appeal the court’s decision, but it
will only delay the inevitable. If Pinchuk and Maypaul refuse the debt, Thaler said it should take “some months” to collect it. It is
“a bit over $500,000 and it grows every day,” Thaler said.
Kyiv Post staff writer
Yuriy Onyshkiv can be reached at [email protected]
