Sverdlovsk Region Arbitration Court held a preliminary hearing of the claim laid by SK Iset against Ural Exhibition Center; the plaintiff wants to be paid 246.28m RUR for the jobs completed in the course of putting up the international exhibition center Yekaterinburg Expo.

SK Iset was involved in building the engineering networks on the construction site between December 2010 and April 2011, and is now trying to get the money for the job. The company says the two parties did not sign any independent work contract, and all their agreements were mostly based on business correspondence and project documentation coordination.

Now the defendant claims the networks were built outside the construction site, on the land allotment that belongs to Yekaterinburg City Council, not to Ural Exhibition Center.

According to Ural Exhibition Center’s Director-General Ernest Yelizarov, it was the city council that actually promised to finance the networks.

‘We had to sign a letter of guarantee in order to have the building commissioned for the Innoprom exhibition. SK Iset would not sign the commissioning papers without our letter of guarantee, and their refusal to sign the papers would have made Innoprom impossible,’ Yelizarov explained at the court hearing.

Ural Exhibition Center’s legal representative added that the jobs completed must be paid for by the actual customer: the networks must be classified as municipal property and paid for by the city council.

It was decided in the course of the hearing that a third party, Rusgrad Construction Company, should be involved in the case. The next court hearing was scheduled for 3:00 PM on November 23, 2011.