MOSCOW, August 14 (RIA Novosti) – A Russian man who tricked a bank into signing a deal with him on his own terms has reached an out-of-court settlement with the credit institution, whose owner previously threatened to have him jailed for fraud, the bank said Wednesday.
“Conflict is unconstructive, so we decided to end it in a gentlemanly fashion, mutually dropping complaints,” Tinkoff Credit Systems president Oliver Hughes said in a statement on the bank’s website.
The bank cited the other party, Voronezh resident Dmitry Agarkov, as saying his trick was “a joke that went too far.”
Agarkov applied for a credit card at the bank in 2008, but sent in a tweaked application form, which the bank signed, apparently because the clerk did not expect the form to be edited. He said later he edited the fine print because it was hiding extra conditions leading to increased payments not mentioned in the bank’s original ad.
The story came to light last week, when Tinkoff Credit Systems sued Agarkov for 45,000 rubles ($1,400) in missed payments and was hit with a 24-million-ruble ($730,000) lawsuit based on the new terms specified in the tweaked form.
The bank’s eccentric owner Oleg Tinkov said on Twitter last week that he will see Agarkov jailed for fraud, prompting Agarkov to say he planned to leave Russia over this “threat.”
Tinkov posted a brief Tweet saying that the conflict had been settled and linking to the statement on the bank’s website, but not adding any more detail.