Court: delay at the stage of examination of project documentation under a state contract is not a reason for penalties
The parties signed a comprehensive contract for design and construction work. The contractor violated the deadline, including the stage "Obtaining a positive conclusion from the state examination." The customer charged a penalty.
The appeal and cassation decided that it was impossible to charge a penalty for the delay in this stage:
- for the controversial stage, the scope of work to be performed was not determined. Depending on the result of the examination, the contractor at this stage may correct the project or do nothing if there are no comments;
- violation of the deadlines occurs when the customer informed the contractor about the comments of the state examination, but he did not eliminate them in time. Such cases were not pointed out to the court.
Earlier, the 9th Arbitration Court of Appeal in a similar dispute also did not recover a penalty for the delay in the stage "Obtaining a positive conclusion from the state examination." The court noted: obtaining an opinion is not a job, but a requirement for the quality of project documentation. According to the Town Planning Code of the Russian Federation, the customer sends it for examination, therefore, in addition to eliminating possible comments, the contractor does not perform any work at this stage.