Points of law: 1) whether court has a right to evaluate at its own initiative the reasonability of amounts expended by the winning party for court representation, and subsequently reduce them when recovering them from the losing party?  2) whether the evaluation of the reasonability of expenses is anyhow affected by the fact that they must be recovered from the State budget?

Ratio decidendi: with regard to the first point the Presidium sided with inferior courts, having pointed out that court does have power to recover at its own initiative the expenses within the limits which it believes to be  reasonable. Such power  is one of the remedies provided by law and levelled against an unjustified overpricing of attorney’s services,  and therefore aiming at the realization of a constitutional requirement, according to which the exercise of rights and duties of man and the citizen should not violate the rights and freedoms of other persons.

With regards to the second point the Presidium, on the contrary, gave support to the view of the panel of judges who referred the case to the Presidium. It opined that the recovery of expenses for court representation from the federal budget does not testify to the amount of the expenses being unreasonable or excessive.

A dissenting opinion of Justice Petrova is appended to the judgment. In her view, the fact that the cases, in which the expenses were to be recovered,  were relatively simple, should not in and of itself serve as a ground for their reduction, and the Presidium ought to take into account the unscrupulous behavior of the tax inspection, as evinced by its bringing to court the cases which were clearly losing.

Practical consequences: the Judgment says that prior court decisions in analogous cases if inconsistent with this interpretation may be reversed in the procedure and within the limits envisaged by Art 311 of the Commercial Procedure Code.