Financial and economic expertise can be extremely various in terms of the composition of the issues being raised for research. They may relate not only to aspects of the financial and economic activities of the enterprise as a whole, but also to the study of specific operations, the calculation of their consequences, losses, sanctions under contracts between counterparties.
At the beginning of 2022, we conducted a financial and economic examination on the calculation of compensation (penalties) under the contract for the provision of logistics services.
The study was conducted on the basis of United Confectioners LLC - the largest confectionery holding in Russia and throughout Eastern Europe, part of The GUTA Group, which includes the factories "Krasny Oktyabr", "Roth Front" and "Babaevsky" and a number of regional enterprises.
The company signed a contract for the provision of services with a logistics company, according to which it handled goods in its warehouse. That is, the counterparty has a certain distribution center, to which trucks come from factories. The goods from these trucks must be unloaded to the warehouse at a certain time, processed, and then loaded onto vehicles that will deliver it to customers.
The agreement also provided for certain penalties for violation of the regulatory deadlines for unloading and loading vehicles, i.e. for excessive downtime. It would seem that this is a trivial thing, the parties themselves can check and calculate fines under the contract, and why do they involve third-party experts with financial and economic education here? However, it should be taken into account that the annual revenue of United Confectioners is about 60 billion rubles, and the volume of logistics services consumed (excluding transport costs) is about 1 billion rubles. Accordingly, firstly, this is a huge volume of transactions and documentation on them, and, secondly, downtime and fines for them can result in a fairly large amount.
The plaintiff carried out work on the analysis of loading and unloading data for a period of about one and a half years of work with the defendant company. According to its results, systematic violations of the terms of the contract were revealed in the form of excessive downtime, compensation for which totaled 150-200 million rubles. But the fact is that initially the plaintiff's calculation is based on unloading from billing systems, in which, as it turned out, there were many mistakes The justification of the claims should be as convincing as possible, have an accurate character, and should be supported by documents.Initially, the plaintiff began independently, without waiting for objections from the defendant, to verify the data of billing systems with primary transport documents (waybills) and revealed a number of mistakes. During the trial, he presented an updated calculation of the claims. However, the defendant nevertheless objected to the validity of the claims, and the plaintiff engaged our company as a specialist to analyze, verify, correct his calculations and, if necessary, adjust them.
The total volume of waybills was more than 27 thousand documents. We were provided with electronic registers in Excel format, copies of the consignment notes, the contract and copies of the plaintiff's calculations. As part of this work, we checked the Commodity transport consignment, verified the correctness of transferring data from them to tables, and analyzed special marks. Using the spreadsheet functionality, we checked the correctness of the calculation of penalties based on the terms of the contract. This task required the ability to work with large amounts of data. We did a great job with this task.
As a result, we corrected all incorrect data in the registers, which led to significant distortions in the final results, identified a number of systematic errors in the formulas, adjusted the calculations of the plaintiff (in fact, an alternative updated calculation was presented). Despite a number of corrections, since the plaintiff had initially already carried out an independent check, correcting the remaining errors identified did not lead to a significant change in the size of the claims.
Based on the conclusion prepared by Valrus, the plaintiff repeatedly clarified the claims. The conclusion was accepted by the courts as proper evidence. The defendant, despite repeated attempts, was unable to disprove the conclusions of our experts. The court made a decision confirming both the correctness of our calculations and the validity of the plaintiff's claims as a total.