The Supreme Court of Ukraine has granted the cassation appeal filed by Tetiana Yeremeyeva, the widow of businessman Ihor Yeremeyev, in the case against Ukrainian MP Stepan Ivakhiv.
This is stated in the Court's Resolution published in the Unified State Register of Court Decisions.
Tetiana Yeremeyeva challenged the property division agreement concluded between MP Ivakhiv and his ex-wife on 30 September 2021. The widow claimed that Ivakhiv had transferred corporate rights to the assets of the Continium Group, in which 25% belonged to Yeremeyev, to his ex-wife for free on the basis of a divorce property division agreement to avoid a possible division of the inheritance with the widow and children of Ihor Yeremeyev.
The Supreme Court overturned the decisions of the previous instances, which had refused to recognise the property division agreement between the ex-spouses Ivakhiv and Yeremeyeva as invalid, and sent the case back to the court of first instance for reconsideration.
In particular, the court acknowledged that the previous courts had committed serious procedural violations and pointed out that the Ivakhovs' abuse of law should be checked during the retrial.
The Supreme Court noted that the conclusion of such a property division agreement could have been used to avoid the distribution of assets belonging to Tetiana Yeremeyeva's inheritance.
As journalists remind us, the legal dispute between Yeremeyev's family and his former business partners, Serhiy Lagur and Stepan Ivakhiv, has been ongoing since the death of the founder of the Continium holdingin 2015. Ivakhiv and Lagur have set up a joint trust, which, according to Tatiana Yeremeyeva, is intended to exclude the family of the deceased businessman from the disposal of his share of the holding's assets.
At the same time, the former partners claim that the R&S Trust was created by Ihor Yeremeyev himself. It allegedly included shares in Yudelle Asset Holdings and WOG Holding Ltd. which were formed after the restructuring of WOG Group and the transfer of jurisdiction to the Netherlands and the British Virgin Islands. The assets of the other divisions of the WOG Group were owned by Serhiy Lagur and Stepan Ivakhiv in equal shares of 37.5% each. Instead, Lagur and Ivakhiv bought out Ihor Yeremeyev's shareholding, and the family did not receive the right to manage it through their participation in the trust.