IT company knocked out 74 million from the Pension Fund under a contract that the authorities recognized as invalid
The Pension Fund, by court order, must pay off the IT contractor, although it seems unable to do this without conflicting with the position of the Federal Treasury.
Money for an integrator under a “crooked” contract
As CNews found out, the Pension Fund (PFR; recently included in the Social Fund) will have to pay off the IT company Organizational and Technological Solutions 2000 (OTR 2000, part of the OTR group) under a contract that was previously recognized by the Federal treasury is invalid.
This decision was made by the Moscow Arbitration Court, which filed a lawsuit against the OTR fund on August 3, 2022.
The total amount of the problematic contract concluded on August 5, 2021 following the results of an open tender , to which no one else came except OTP, amounted to 227.2 million rubles. The scope of work, calculated for the period up to March 3, 2022, meant supporting the software of the unified state social security information system (EGISSO) in terms of the subsystem for establishing and paying social protection measures (support).
From the documents of the court proceedings, it can be concluded that OTR was fully paid for the first two stages of work in the amount of 154 million rubles. The third stage caused some complaints from the state customer. However, he made the decision not to pay for it at all on the basis of the conclusions of the Federal Treasury following the results of a scheduled field audit of the Pension Fund.
During this audit , the agency found that the FIU allowed the misappropriation of budget funds in the amount of 75.1 million rubles. In the presence of another, earlier contract with ” OTR 2000 ” dated January 13, 2020 for the development of the EGISSO software , the fund concluded a new one with the company (considered here), while part of the services had already been paid under the old one.
Thus, according to the position of the Federal Treasury, the new contract was concluded unreasonably and, as a result, payment for services under it has no sufficient grounds.
Despite this, the Moscow Arbitration Court sided with OTP 2000 and ordered the Pension Fund to pay the company a debt of 73.2 million rubles, as well as a penalty of 46 thousand rubles, that is, a total of 73.7 million rubles.
The editors of CNews sent inquiries to the parties as to whether they are satisfied with the decision, and whether they plan to challenge it.
Note that both contracts mentioned here are currently in the “execution” status, that is, they have not been terminated, although the official deadline for this execution has already passed. In the case of an earlier contract, we are talking about December 4, 2020, while its amount is 249.5 million rubles.
Court position
The documents of the proceedings explain that an invalid transaction does not entail legal consequences, with the exception of those “related to its invalidity.” The transaction is invalid from the moment it was made. In case of invalidity, each of the parties is obliged to return to the other everything received under the transaction, unless other consequences of invalidity are provided by law.
“Meanwhile, the defendant did not provide documents proving that in this case, taking into account the subject of the contract and its purpose, the transaction infringes on public interests or the rights and legally protected interests of third parties,” the judges point out.
In addition, they believe that since both problematic contracts were approved and executed by the Pension Fund, the contractor had no objective reason to doubt the validity of the transactions.
“Taking into account the evidence of the actual provision of services by the defendant, there are no grounds for recognizing his actions as dishonest,” the ministers of Themis are sure. — On the contrary, at the conclusion of the contract dated August 5, 2021, the defendant could not have been unaware of the restrictions on the use of system components that are objects of intellectual property , in connection with which, the imposition of negative consequences as a result of illegal actions of the customer, subject to the conscientious performance of the contract by the plaintiff , is unfounded.”
