Success – final acquittal of a client accused of mismanagement of company assets in the Court of Second Instance

The trial of our client, who held the position of president of a real estate company, which lasted 10 years, ended with a final acquittal verdict of the Court of Appeal . The client was charged with acting to the detriment of the company as a consequence of a number of transactions that were allegedly unjustified from the point of view of the company’s interests. According to the Prosecution’s estimates, the estimated value of the caused property damage was to be over PLN 7 million, for which the President of the Management Board was threatened with up to 10 years’ imprisonment.

The case conducted on behalf of the law firm by Bartłomiej Pietruszka, advocate, was distinguished by several “plot” twists. Our client entered into a number of agreements which, according to the Prosecution, led to the depletion of shareholders’ assets in a group of related companies. The President’s antagonists in the dispute promptly filed a notice to the Public Prosecutor’s Office on the commission of an offence of mismanagement – in their opinion – of the company’s assets, the purpose of which was to allegedly deplete their assets. Evidence was collected during the pre-trial proceedings which confirmed the theses contained in the notification of the possibility of committing a crime, in particular, already at this stage, the Prosecutor appointed an expert in the field of business valuation, who, on the basis of his expert opinion, confirmed the violation of the principles of economy and, consequently, the actual occurrence of property damage of an estimated value.

Despite the extensive evidence already gathered at the investigation stage, our client’s line of defence proved so successful that in the first instance the Court acquitted him of all charges, which he appeared to have thoroughly argued. In the course of the proceedings before the first instance, the Court managed to convince the Court that a number of important elements for the possibility of imputing the commission of a criminal offence to the President of the Management Board were in fact missing: it was pointed out that there had been no abuse of powers or failure to fulfil duties in connection with his function as a member of the company’s Management Board, that it had not been shown that there had actually been a breach of the principle of economy, and that multi-million pound property damage had been caused. In all these areas, BBS’s lawyers succeeded in upholding the defence, including the appointment of a new expert who reassessed the transactions carried out.

However, this was not the final end of the story. Despite the exhaustive argumentation contained in the acquittal, the public prosecutor challenged the said verdict by way of appeal. The course of the trial in the Court of Appeal was based on an attempt to refute the main arguments of the defence, which decided on the acquittal of the CEO.

The white-collar crime team of the firm was involved in the case, in the persons of: advocate Bartłomiej Pietruszka, trainee advocate Michał Busz.