The occupiers damaged many Ukrainian enterprises. To support business, the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine approved a Resolution defining key criteria for the development of a methodology for determining damages.
The main direction in which the level of damage will be assessed includes the “economic losses of enterprises” of all forms of ownership. The following types of business losses will be considered:
- destruction or damage to property,
- lost benefit because of impossibility or obstacles in the conduct of economic activity,
- losses from unpaid goods, works, and services provided and consumed in the temporarily occupied territories.
Losses of farmers, owners or users of agricultural land plots will be determined by clause 6 of the “loss of the land fund” and the methodology of the Ministry of Agrarian Policy and Food.
The order can be supplemented by types and directions of losses.
In addition, the government has identified state agencies that will assess the damage and approve these methodologies. The methodologies will be developed by authorized agencies in up to 6 months.
Preparing for compensation of damages:
- Fixation of losses
In Ukraine, there is no clear algorithm for assessing the damage caused to business due to the war. However, we recommend not to delay and now, if possible, to record losses.
Photo and video recording
Regardless of whether you own the property or rent it, you should record the damage yourself. This can be a photo and video with detailed coverage of all the damage. We recommend that you take photos and video recordings with witnesses or neighbors who can comment on what they saw. At the same time, it is important to record the date, time, address of the location of the shooting, personal data, and information about witnesses. This will be reliable evidence if your case is heard in court or by the specialized commission.
It is also necessary to record the facts of loss/damage to movable property, for example, equipment or furniture that was in the destroyed rented room. If you have lost such property, your company may claim compensation for lost profits — the countable or financial amount of losses, the expected increase in such property. The lost benefit can be confirmed by documents certifying the possibility of receiving funds in the absence of damage.
Those who do not have the opportunity to carry out direct fixation can collect information about the destruction or damage to property from the media or the Internet — upload photos or videos showing your property, take screenshots.
Documentary fixation
Losses are important to be recorded on paper as well. To draw up an official document, we recommend calling employees of the State Emergency Service (SES). In the act of destruction/damage, it is worth noting the cause of their occurrence (shelling, missile strike, mining, etc.) and obtaining a copy of it.
Moreover, you can contact the police to open criminal proceedings on the fact of destruction or damage to property. The application must indicate the circumstances in which the property was damaged. Within 24 hours from the date of receipt of your application, police officers are obliged to issue you an extract from the Unified Register of Pre-Trial Investigations. As part of the pre-trial investigation, an inspection of the scene will be conducted and a protocol will be drawn up, a copy of which you can receive.
Another way of documentation is drawing up internal acts of the enterprise: orders on the impossibility of using property due to its destruction or damage, acts on conducting a survey/inventory, write-off acts, defective act.
- Collection of documents
To collect evidence, it is necessary to conduct an audit of existing documents confirming the possession or use of goods, equipment, equipment, and immovable/movable property that was lost/damaged as a result of the war. These can be:
– certificates of ownership, registration of the vehicle;
– contracts of sale or lease;
– extracts from registers;
– invoices, technical passports, acts of receiving and transferring, etc.
If such documents are lost, you should start the process of their restoration. For example, get extracts from the State Register of Property Rights to Immovable Property after the resumption of its work.
It is also necessary to collect financial documents — reports, including on the inventory of property, its carrying amount, audit conclusions, internal reports on the enterprise.
- Assessment of the damage caused
The government instructed the specialized ministries (the Ministry of Communities and Territories Development, the Ministry of Economy, the Ministry of Agrarian Policy and Food) and the State Property Fund in agreement with the Ministry of Reintegration to develop and approve the methodology for calculating losses for business.
However, specialized bodies, executive authorities, regional state administrations (until the end of martial law — military civilian administrations), and the KCSA will be establishing the economic losses of enterprises.
The amount of direct losses is likely to depend on the carrying amount of lost property, the cost of reconstruction, repair, or integral improvements in damaged property and similar indicators.
- Report losses
Until the government has approved the procedure for filing applications for compensation of business losses, it is possible to report damage or destruction of property through online resources — damaged.in.ua, dokaz.gov.ua, and warcrimes.gov.ua. They collect information and evidence of losses suffered by the state and Ukrainians as a result of military aggression to prepare claims against russia in international courts for compensation for these losses.
