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Foreign general counsel evaluating a dispute with a Belarusian counterparty arrive at the same fork most cross-border litigators recognize: the contract has — or should have — an international arbitration clause, and the question becomes which institution to choose. The familiar shortlist is ICC in Paris, LCIA in London, and the Arbitration Institute of the […]

A foreign engineering company is finalising a multi-year supply contract with a Belarusian industrial buyer. Procurement is happy. Commercial terms are clean. The in-house lawyer in Vienna, who picked up the file on a Friday afternoon, opens what she thinks will be a forty-five-minute job — run the counterparty against a sanctions list, send the […]

Picture a situation most of our foreign clients have been in at least once. You’ve got a Belarusian buyer, a multi-shipment supply contract, and three tranches that went fine. The fourth arrives, the buyer discovers a quality issue (or says they did), withholds payment on that batch, and then — while they’re at it — […]

Most foreign creditors who reach out to us about a Belarusian debtor get to us at roughly the same point. Invoices ninety days past, reminder emails going unanswered, and a finance director asking whether it’s time to escalate. The reflex — natural enough if you came up in a Western legal system — is to […]

The dispute resolution clause is the paragraph nobody reads at signing and everybody needs when something breaks. By the time the contract is on the litigation lawyer’s desk, the question of where this fight is going to happen is already decided — by language a procurement manager pasted in two years earlier from a template. […]

The bank told you it cannot release the financing without a Belarusian legal opinion. The buyer’s counsel mentioned, late in the SPA negotiation, that a legal opinion from a local advocate would need to sit in the closing bible. The regulator asked for one as part of an authorisation. In each of these moments, a […]

Your lease is ending, you’ve signed for a new office, and now you need to update the company’s virtual address. Most owners walk into this assuming it’s a single filing with the local executive committee — submit a form, get the new entry in the register, done. It isn’t. It’s a cascade of about eight […]

If you have ended up on this page, you are probably in one of three situations. You are negotiating a contract with a Belarusian counterparty and trying to figure out where any future dispute should be heard. You already have a dispute and you are wondering whether to go to a state court, a Belarusian […]

The term sheet is signed. The vendor sent over a data-room login on Friday. You have four weeks, a Belarusian target, and a board meeting on the other side of it. The seller calls the diligence standard. Your gut says it isn’t, and your gut is usually right when the jurisdiction is one your firm […]

The contract’s drafted. The Belarusian side has sent over a scan of their charter, a TIN number, and a cheerful note asking when you can sign. Your procurement team wants this wrapped by Friday. Legal has a gut feeling that something should be checked — but what, exactly? This is the moment the article is […]

You won the case. The court issued a judgment. A bailiff is nominally involved. And yet — months pass, sometimes years, and the debtor has paid little or nothing. This is a familiar situation for many creditors in Belarus, particularly foreign ones who assumed that a court order was the finish line rather than the […]

The judgment came through. German commercial court, English High Court, Lithuanian court — wherever the case was heard, your side won. The Belarusian debtor has money sitting in Belarus. The question now is whether that piece of paper does anything in Minsk. It can — but not by itself. A foreign court judgment carries no […]