A court in St. Petersburg rejected a bank’s request to reconsider a ruling invalidating a 180,000-ruble loan agreement issued in a woman’s name by third parties. The bank based its request on a ruling by the Russian Supreme Court concerning singer Larisa Dolina’s case.
The woman filed a complaint with law enforcement, saying the loan amount had not been given to her. She subsequently sued to have the agreement declared invalid.
The court found that the transaction had been carried out using a mobile device the woman had never used before and that the phone number used to access the system had been changed during the transaction. On this basis, the court invalidated the loan agreement and released the woman from the loan debt.
Under the ruling, the bank was ordered to pay the woman 10,000 rubles in non-pecuniary damages, a 5,000-ruble fine and 24,000 rubles in legal costs. The total awarded payment thus amounted to 39,000 rubles.
Court declines to treat Dolina ruling as a precedent
Bank representatives argued that the agreement had been signed remotely. They said the system had been accessed using a username and password known to the plaintiff or one-time passwords sent to her mobile phone. The bank therefore argued that there were insufficient grounds to conclude that the transaction had been carried out by third parties.
The bank also requested a reconsideration of the case, saying that new circumstances had emerged after the ruling. Its application cited the Russian Supreme Court’s decision in the Larisa Dolina case and argued that the two cases involved the same circumstances.
The St. Petersburg court, however, concluded that the ruling did not constitute a new circumstance requiring the earlier judgment to be reconsidered under the law. The court also noted that the circumstances of the two cases were not similar in their specific details.
The Russian Supreme Court’s Dolina ruling
Larisa Dolina said in the summer of 2024 that fraudsters had forced her to sell her apartment in central Moscow and hand over the proceeds from the sale. The singer took the case concerning the apartment sale to court, and the proceedings ultimately reached the Russian Supreme Court.
In December 2025, the Russian Supreme Court ruled that ownership of the apartment would remain with the buyer, Polina Lurie. The ruling stated that Dolina was the victim of a crime.
