A panel of judges has ordered a lawyer to refund his former client and widow of a Kazakhstan oligarch €300,000 after it ruled that he had failed to respect terms linked to the repayment of money he had appropriated without her knowledge.
The court of appeal confirmed a decision by the first court handed down last year when it had ordered lawyer Pio Valletta to pay his former client, Elnara Shorazova, widow of Rakhat Aliyev.
Presided over by Chief Justice Mark Chetcuti and judges Joseph R Micallef and Tonio Mallia confirmed the ruling by the court of first instance.
Shorazova had sued her former lawyer after he had defaulted on repayments of money he had appropriated without her consent.
The two had signed a deed in 2012 where he was to pay her the sum of €900,000 he had withheld without her permission. The payments were meant to be made in instalments between July 2013 and July 2018 but he had defaulted on some repayments.
Shorazova had filed a suit in which Valletta had asked the court to enforce a private agreement through which she would have waived €300,000 of the global amount if the lawyer paid her €600,000 within the stipulated time frame.
Shorazova also agreed to withdraw the report she had made to the police against the defendant for misappropriating the money as well as withdrawing the claim filed against him before the Commission for the Administration of Justice.
Shorazova had filed the case alleging that Valletta was not punctual in the agreed payments, with the consequence that it necessitated triggering the clause regarding the waiver of the sum of €300,000 from the total sum of €900,000.
Valletta had argued that his interpretation of the agreement was that if the repayments were not paid according to the stipulated dates, the amount of €300,000 was to be paid to him as payment for his professional services.
The court ruled against Valletta, rubbishing his line of defence and ordering him to pay the €300,000. He appealed the judgment claiming that the case was time-barred and other points of law.
However, the appeals court threw out his complaints and confirmed the first judgment, ordering Valletta to pay Shorazova the €300,000 she was due for non-observance of the repayment terms.
The sum of €900,000 had been part of a larger sum of €2.4 million that had been intended to finance an Austrian-based company.
Since the funds could not be deposited in his clients’ ‘shelf company’, the money had been temporarily held in a current account belonging to another company where he was director.
Valletta had eventually been charged with misappropriation of funds but had been acquitted in 2017 after Shorazova had failed to appear in court to testify, ostensibly as a result of the agreement to drop charges.
Aliyev had previously been married to the daughter of Nursultan Nazarbayev, President of Kazakhstan from 1991 to 2019. Political tensions arose between him and his former father-in-law, leading to a warrant being issued for his arrest and he was forced to flee.
He died in prison in Austria in 2015, while awaiting trial on charges of kidnapping and murdering two Kazakh bankers, after having expressed fear that his life was in danger from Kazakhstan’s secret police.
Aliyev was posthumously found not guilty.