Pakistani diplomats will have to pay for Moscow tram repairs: six years of litigation

Moscow transport workers have won a protracted dispute with the Pakistani embassy. A routine accident in the center of Moscow involving a diplomatic mission car and a city tram has become the reason for a multi-year court case.

As MK has learned, the unfortunate accident occurred on June 28, 2019, at the intersection of Bolshaya Tatarskaya Street and Sadovnichesky Proyezd. Here, a tram on route 3 collided with a BMW with diplomatic license plates. There were no casualties, but the incident paralyzed public transport for about 40 minutes. The culprit was quickly identified - it turned out to be the driver of a foreign car who did not give way to the tram. He was brought to administrative responsibility under Article 12.3, Part 2 of the Code of Administrative Offenses and fined 1,000 rubles. This is usually followed by a demand from the transport company to compensate for the damage caused by the accident - the cost of repairing the tram plus compensation for the downtime of other trams. But this was complicated. For some reason, the BMW driver did not say where he worked. Therefore, initially, all of Mosgortrans' claims were addressed to him as a private individual. But when the case came to the hearing of the claim in the Preobrazhensky Court, the owner of the car showed up – the Pakistani Embassy. And since at the time of the accident the driver was performing his official duties, all financial problems had to be resolved by his employers.

The trial dragged on for a long time because the diplomats resorted to a trick. They emphasized that more than three years had passed since the accident, meaning the statute of limitations on the case had expired. But Moscow lawyers proved that the very fact of the Pakistani embassy's involvement in the accident story should be counted not from the moment of the collision, but from the day the court received information about the driver's place of work. This happened on June 7, 2022 - 21 days earlier than the third anniversary of the accident. So the diplomats were a little lucky, and in the end they, not the driver, had to bear responsibility for the accident.

Only recently, the Moscow City Court's appellate court upheld the decision in favor of the transport workers: the diplomats will pay 74,717 rubles 27 kopecks for the accident to compensate for damages, 63,940 rubles to compensate for other expenses, and 2,441 rubles 52 kopecks to compensate for the state fee. It's funny that the driver, who spent the first three years fighting the lawyers alone, also tried to recoup the legal costs - but not entirely successfully. The man was rightly told that he himself hid the fact that he worked at the embassy, ​​which means that, by and large, he deliberately went into expenses. Of the requested 127,300 rubles, the court agreed to compensate only 15 thousand.

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