Out of a joint and several claim of more than EUR 60,000, the client was left with around EUR 1,000

A bankrupt company claimed more than EUR 60,000 jointly and severally from three persons who had managed it at different times — for nine vehicles that nobody had handed over to the insolvency administrator. The claimant could not establish exactly when and in what circumstances each of them had been lost, so it chose the simplest route: claiming the full amount jointly and severally from all three former CEOs, including our client. In theory, this meant that the entire amount of more than EUR 60,000 could have been recovered from her alone.

We built the defence on the principle that the status of a former CEO alone is not sufficient to establish liability for all of the assets not handed over. The actions of each CEO, the specific period of management and the link to the loss of a specific vehicle had to be assessed separately — rather than as one collective liability attributed to no one. The first-instance court agreed with this position and did not apply joint and several liability.

Initially, the client was ordered to pay around EUR 1,000 in damages for two vehicles whose write-off the court considered insufficiently supported by documents — the dispute over this part continued. However, the greatest risk for the client came from the appeal by which the claimant sought to recover from her an additional EUR 10,000 for a truck tractor detained in Belarus and later lost — in that case her total liability would have risen to around EUR 11,000.

We proved that liability for the loss of this particular truck tractor lay not with our client but with another former CEO of the company, whose inaction — not the client's — was directly linked to the loss of the vehicle. The Court of Appeal of Lithuania agreed with this position and did not award the EUR 10,000 against the client.

The final outcome: of the original joint and several claim of more than EUR 60,000 and the subsequent attempt to increase the client's liability to around EUR 11,000, the amount attributed to her remained around EUR 1,000 — the same amount as had already been awarded by the first-instance court.

The case illustrates that joint and several liability is not automatic merely because a person once held the position of CEO — the link between each specific act and specific period and the damage must be proved separately. Collective, non-individualised fault does not hold up in court.