Alongside changes made this year to Russian civil legislation as part of an ongoing modernization process of the Civil Code, some notable changes have also emerged in case law. Russian courts currently have changed their traditional interpretation of many statutory regulation issues, and are taking new approaches. This has affected the implementation of existing statutes by parties to contractual relationships. Below we point out some examples of such changes in the case law.
“Future” Real Estate Acquisition
In general, the acquisition of “future” property (property which does not exist upon a contract signing, but will exist upon the contract’s closing) is allowed by section 2 article 455 in the Civil Code of the Russian Federation. However, the established case law in Russia has traditionally maintained the position that such acquisition is in fact impossible: the courts deem contracts void where the subject matter is not identified. At the same time it’s been widely recognized that the cadastral number of the real property must be the sufficient identification of such property in the contract. From the statutory perspective, new real property obtains its cadastral number only after the completion of its construction.
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