Here is a detailed analysis of the court decision, prepared from a professional standpoint:
1. The subject matter of the dispute is the legality of the return by the courts of first and appellate instances of a serviceman’s statement of claim for the recovery of monetary allowance indexation due to the alleged expiry of the statute of limitations for filing a lawsuit.
2. The court of cassation instance concluded that the lower courts erroneously applied a three-month time limit for filing a lawsuit, linking its commencement to the date the plaintiff was removed from the personnel lists and received a monetary certificate. Crucially, the Supreme Court in this case confirmed the position of the Judicial Chamber, which deviated from the previous conclusions of other panels of the Administrative Court of Cassation, noting that the amendments to Art. 233 of the Labor Code of Ukraine (regarding the limitation of the term for filing a lawsuit to 3 months) do not have retroactive effect in time for legal relations that arose before July 19, 2022. Furthermore, the Supreme Court emphasized that a monetary certificate does not contain detailed information about the components of the monetary allowance for past periods; therefore, the mere fact of its receipt does not mean that the serviceman learned about the violation of his right to indexation. The Court stressed that in order to calculate the time limit for filing a lawsuit, it is necessary to establish the moment when the person received reliable information about the amount and nature of the sums paid to them. Since the courts of lower instances did not take these circumstances into account and misapplied the norms of substantive law, their decisions were declared unlawful.
3. The Supreme Court overturned the ruling of the court of first instance and the decision of the appellate court, remanding the case to the court of first instance for further consideration on the merits.
