A court in Oral has ruled that opening an enforcement case to recover more than 18 million tenge in debt — initiated 17 years after the court ruling — was unlawful, infohub.kz reports.
The press service of the West Kazakhstan Regional Court said the region's specialized inter-district administrative court upheld a citizen's claim against a private bailiff. The court declared the order opening the enforcement proceedings unlawful, annulled it and ordered that all restrictions imposed on the debtor be lifted.
The dispute stemmed from a court ruling under which the plaintiff was ordered to pay a bank 18,351,385 tenge.
Over 17 years, the enforcement document was repeatedly passed to various bailiffs and returned to the creditor because the debtor had no property or income.
The private bailiff later reopened the enforcement proceedings and applied coercive measures against the debtor: bank accounts were frozen, certain actions were prohibited and the debtor was temporarily barred from leaving Kazakhstan.
Disagreeing with the bailiff's actions, the debtor went to court, citing the expiry of the statutory deadline for submitting the enforcement document for compulsory execution.
Under Kazakhstan's Law on Enforcement Proceedings and the Status of Bailiffs, the deadline for submitting an enforcement document for compulsory execution is three years. The law provides for the deadline to be interrupted each time the document is returned to the creditor. After the interruption, the period is counted anew, taking into account the time that elapsed before it.
The court examined every period during which the enforcement document was held by the bank and not submitted for compulsory execution. The calculation showed that, over 17 years in total, the bank kept the document without submitting it for execution for 3 years, 11 months and 21 days — a period exceeding the statutory three-year deadline.
The court said that, when an enforcement document arrives after the deadline, a private bailiff is obliged to issue an order refusing to open enforcement proceedings.
The court dismissed the private bailiff's argument that similar earlier orders by other private bailiffs had not been challenged.
As a result, the court annulled the disputed order opening the enforcement proceedings and ordered the private bailiff to remedy the violations, including lifting the coercive measures applied, among them the freezing of bank accounts and the temporary ban on leaving Kazakhstan.
The private bailiff must comply with the court decision within five working days of it taking legal effect.
If the ruling is not enforced, the defendant will face a monetary penalty of 50 monthly calculation indices (216,250 tenge).
The court decision has taken legal effect.