A UK court has landed exiled Oslo Marine Group (OMG) owner Vitaly Arkhangelsky with a "considerable" costs bill of £13.6m ($17.3m).
The ruling comes after he lost a complex high court case in May against Bank of St Petersburg (BSP) in a row over loan guarantee defaults worth $90m.
Nearly two years after the 46-day trial ended in the UK high court, Justice Robert Hildyard delivered a judgement allowing the lender to recover its money and dismissing "ultimate chancer" Arkhangelsky's $500m counterclaim that BSP illegally appropriated OMG's assets in 2009.
His wife Julia was cleared, however, and will have her costs paid by the bank in relation to the BSP action, although she is liable for the counterclaim.
In the costs ruling, Hildyard said Arkhangelsky, but not his wife, should pay 55% of the costs relating to BSP's claim - a total of £7.6m - and £6m for his counterclaim.
But there will be unspecified deductions for a previous costs order.
Any payment, however, is dependent on a bid by the Russian entrepreneur to have the case heard again at the court of appeal.
Sympathy for Julia Arkhangelskaya
Referring to Julia Arkhangelskaya, Hildyard said: "I have considerable sympathy for the position in which Mrs Arkhangelskaya has found herself; and I continue to think that the bank's pursuit of her has been over-zealous.
"But the fact remains that she was a necessary party to the counterclaim and did seek and stand to benefit by it."
In his first ruling, the judge pointed to misgivings that the full truth had not emerged and refused to brand the Russian businessman's claims as pure fiction.
Arkhangelsky had been fighting to regain control of Scandinavian Insurance and two St Petersburg terminals seized by the bank in the long-running legal dispute.
He later fled to Nice in the south of France.
The shipping and insurance entrepreneur, whom Russia had twice sought to have extradited from France on fraud charges, argued that he was the victim of political persecution by authorities.
OMG also included Vyborg Shipping — a firm that bareboat chartered three general cargoships to move timber, and had plans to fix seven more vessels and order a fleet of 10 newbuildings.
However, BSP took over OMG’s port assets under repossession and loan-guarantee contracts secured in December 2008 after extended loans to develop various businesses within the group came to term unpaid during the continuing financial crisis.
BSP then sold the terminals at relatively low prices in auctions over the second half of 2009.
"Buccaneer" signed documents
Arkhangelsky claims the terminals were sold to companies linked to the bank’s senior managers after the bank defaulted on a six-month moratorium on loans. He also alleges he did not agree to several of the repo deals, or that they were forged.
But Hildyard ruled he had signed the documents and added that his general impression of Arkhangelsky was as a buccaneer, the "ultimate chancer" as BSP put it, whose confidence in his own abilities and determination to succeed caused him to take on risks that he did not contemplate would eventuate.
The judge said that, in the war between the parties, all sense of commercial reasonableness was lost on both sides, and in the case of BSP, it "determined to, and did, opportunistically and in some respects ruthlessly, pursue their own commercial objectives without any regard to anything more than formal compliance with their obligations under Russian law, and have personally profited in the result."
