The Supreme Court will review the ruling that the state fuel distributor Čepro does not have to pay Lancelin CZK 2.6 billion in a dispute over allegedly stored fuel. The Czech Court of Justice, which ruled as a first instance, received an appeal at the end of December. The Municipal Court should now hand over the appeal to the highest instance in Brno together with the file.
Lancelin was unsuccessful in a commercial dispute before the Municipal Court and subsequently also before the High Court in Prague. Justice was based on the previous conclusion of the criminal court that the claim, originally asserted by Venturon Investment, is fictitious and that the entrepreneur Radovan Krejčíř and former Čepra sales director Martin Pechan were behind its creation.
“The civil court has no room to continue or repeat the evidence that was heard before the criminal court,” said František Švantner, chairman of the Board of Appeal, last September. He thus confirmed a previous decision of the Prague Municipal Court, which did not deal with Lancelin’s lawsuit in a commercial dispute precisely because of the existence of a criminal judgment.
Venturon’s receivables have changed hands several times, and Lancelin has been enforcing it since 2016. Through the lawsuit, Čepro sought to give 264,000 tons of diesel and gasoline, or, if that was not possible, to pay a total of about CZK 2.6 billion plus interest on delay. Lancelin’s representative pointed out that the company was not a party to the criminal proceedings and could therefore not adduce evidence. They therefore asked the civil court to take further evidence.
At the beginning of the dispute was the company Bena, which imported fuel from Slovakia and since 1996 used the Čepra storage system. In 2002, Bena concluded a deal with Venturon, to which, according to Čepr, it also transferred fuel on paper, which it did not have at its disposal. The fuel distributor said that the fictitious business should have helped Bena not have to pay extra taxes.
Venturon then began to enforce fuel after Čepro, and in 2003 he turned to the court for the first time. In connection with this, Čepro faced execution. As it turned out later in the criminal courts, Čepro was not aware of this lawsuit at all. One of the members of Krejčíř’s gang convinced Čepro’s clerk to conceal the subpoenas. The courts then acknowledged the alleged claim and the execution in the state-owned enterprise did not take place only due to police intervention.
In 2018, courts sentenced the fugitive Krejčíř to a total sentence of 15 years in prison for attempting to tunnel Čepro and other crimes. However, the man is currently serving long prison sentences in South Africa for attempted murder or drug trafficking. The courts sent Pechan behind bars for five years, he failed with a constitutional complaint. According to available information, the Czech Constitutional Court has not yet ruled on Krejčíř’s complaint.
Source: CTK
