On May 7, the ninth Moscow Arbitration Court of Appeal delivered an interesting decision, satisfying the petition in a bankruptcy case. Within the framework of this case, the debtor was obliged to transfer access to his cryptograph to the creditor, RBC
writes . The contents of the wallet should be sold (transferred to Fiat) in the near future.
Earlier, Russian courts did not recognize cryptocurrency as property, nor was it qualified as money. The judges referred to the lack of a regulatory framework necessary for making such a decision. In particular, two years ago, the St. Petersburg City Court ruled that "virtual money is not the subject of the material world and does not exist in a physically tangible form."
In making the first decision, the court refused to consider cryptocurrency as property, stating that it represents only “some set of symbols of symbols”, originating “from the Internet”. And since the cryptocurrency does not have a single control center, and the users are anonymous, therefore it cannot be established that it belongs to a specific individual. The court then argued that crypto money differs from real money in digital form in that, in the first case, ordinary fiat money must be deposited into an electronic account, but in the second case, bitcoin and altcoins initially exist in electronic form.
The plaintiff contested this statement, stating that the cryptocurrency belongs to the debtor and no one disputes this. Moreover, the defendant in the lawsuit acknowledges the fact of possession of a cryptograph. The Court of Appeal took the side of the plaintiff and recognized the cryptocurrency property. “Cancel the definition completely and resolve the issue on the merits,” the court file on the basis of the meeting
says .
The plaintiff was financial manager Alexey Leonov, and the defendant was Ilya Tsarkov, who owns the digital wallet and its contents on the Blockchain.info platform. Tsarkov was declared bankrupt in October 2017. He owed the company LLC Rikas Finance under a guarantee agreement of more than 18 million rubles.