A New York appeals court on Thursday affirmed the dismissal of a $500 million malpractice suit by an Austrian bank against Chadbourne & Parke over advice the firm’s Moscow lawyers gave the bank about the structure of an investment vehicle whose legality later came under scrutiny.
Creditanstalt Investment Bank AG, which later merged with UniCredit Bank Austria AG, accused Chadbourne of failing to warn it of the legal consequences of using a certain type of partnership structure for investing in the Russian natural gas company, Gazprom. The bank used the investment structure until their office in Russia was raided by the country’s tax police in 1999. Facing criminal prosecutions, the bank shut down its Russia business in 2000 until a six-year statute of limitations ran out and then acquired a company to reopen in Russia.
