The ICC International Court of Arbitration has refused to hear a lawsuit filed by Russia’s Fund for Protection of Investors’ Rights in Foreign States against Lithuania on more than 1 billion euros in damages over the nationalisation of the Snoras bank.
The bank collapsed in 2011 and the Lithuanian government nationalised its shares from its Russian owner Vladimir Antonov who was charged with large-scale asset embezzlement.
On July 1, the Paris-based court issued a final and binding ruling, Lithuania’s Finance Ministry said on July 12.
The fund, which claimed to be Antonov’s successor based on a bilateral investment protection treaty between Lithuania and Russia, filed its lawsuit with the arbitration court in April 2019.
Moreover, on June 13, the US Supreme Court rejected the fund’s request to order Simon Freakley, a former interim administrator of Snoras, to testify and provide data on the bank’s administration in 2011.
The Russian fund claimed that Lithuania violated four clauses of the bilateral treaty on mutual protection of investments by liquidating the Snoras bank and failing to pay Antonov any damages.
Back in 2016, Antonov also initiated a lawsuit against Lithuania at the Moscow Arbitration Court, seeking more than half a billion euros in damages for Snoras’ nationalisation. The case was eventually dropped after Lithuania decided to invoke state immunity from the jurisdiction of Russian courts.
Snoras was forced to suspend its operations and was nationalised in late 2011. Lithuanian prosecutors later carried out an investigation and handed the case over to court in December 2019. The case alleged large-scale embezzlement of Snoras’ assets. The bank’s former executives and shareholders, Antonov and Raimondas Baranauskas, were charged in this case.
The two initially fled to the UK where in 2015 British courts agreed to extradite Antonov and Baranauskas to Lithuania. However, they managed to flee to Russia and were granted asylum there. Moscow has so far refused to provide legal assistance to Lithuania in the case. (LRT/Business World Magazine)