Tamaz Somkhishvili, who positions himself as a British investor and is attempting to take legal action against Kyiv to obtain $100 million from the city, has been revealed to possess Russian citizenship. The Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine provided the Kyiv City Hall with this information, and Ruslan Pavlov, the chief specialist of the Department of Organization of Claim Work and Legal Representation of the Department of Legal Support of the Department of Economy and Investments of the Kyiv City State Administration, made this information public during a hearing of the Northern Commercial Court of Appeal.
“The executive body received a letter from the Ministry of Justice containing the following data from the Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ministry of Defense. According to the results of the inspection of the Kyiv Terminal company, it was found that the ultimate beneficiary of the company is a citizen of Russia. Relevant materials have been sent to the court through the electronic system to be added to the case,” Ruslan Pavlov said on November 22 during the court session.
Given the new data released by the representative of the Kyiv City State Administration, the court session was postponed to December 20, 2022.
To recap, Tamaz Somhishvili positions himself as a British investor whose rights were violated in Ukraine. Last year, he sent an open appeal to the Government of Ukraine, demanding that his company be compensated for damages in the amount of $100 million for the reconstruction of Kharkiv Square, despite the fact that construction work had never begun on the site. The entrepreneur refers to the government agreement between Ukraine and Great Britain on the promotion and mutual protection of investments. If he and the state of Ukraine fail to reach a peaceful settlement of the dispute, he threatens to initiate arbitration proceedings against Ukraine.
To recap, in 2007, the little-known company Kyiv Terminal, whose beneficiary is the Russian-Georgian businessman Tamaz Somkhishvili, won a tender for the reconstruction of one of Kyiv’s traffic interchanges. Officials and human rights defenders are convinced that the company had initially not have the plan to conduct construction work. According to the ex-deputy chief architect of Kyiv Viktor Gleba, even the construction project of the transport interchange was never developed and approved, and the investment agreement was terminated due to violation of the law, forgery of signatures and false information. In 2013, the investment agreement was terminated by agreement of both parties. But at the end of 2018, when the statute of limitations for appealing this decision had already expired, the Kyiv Terminal company filed a lawsuit against the Kyiv authorities for $100 million. The judge of the first instance partially sustained the claim, and the case is currently on appeal.
