Businesses invited to be partners of the Anti-Crisis Settlement and Accounting Center, created by eccentric barter proponent German Sterligov, have started filing lawsuits to get their money back.

The project, also known by its Russian acronym, ARTTs, had its accounts blocked at Trust National Bank and Sberbank by the Federal Court Marshals Service on Wednesday. The company’s official web site was also blocked.

The marshals were acting on a Nov. 26 order from the Moscow Arbitration Court, which upheld an earlier ruling in a 9.2 million ruble ($311,000) lawsuit filed by Moscow-based company Bolshoi Biznes.

Alexander Kostin, a lawyer who represented Bolshoi Biznes in court, said the marshals found several thousand rubles on ARTTs’ accounts but had yet to turn up any other property.

ARTTs marketed itself aggressively as an anti-crisis bartering system and invited partners to join by purchasing software and establishing regional settlement centers, which would allow customers to settle accounts across national and regional borders.

Sterligov has said there were two possible ways to connect to the system. The first method costs 30,000 euros ($43,200), while the second costs 200,000 euros; in total, the project had taken in 1.5 million euros from partners, while Sterligov estimated his own expenses at 35 million euros.

Sterligov is the project’s only owner.

Bolshoi Biznes, however, is not the only company that has soured on Sterligov’s offer. Yekaterinburg-based businessman Dmitry Zaikov filed and won a 10.5 million ruble lawsuit against ARTTs in the city’s Kirov District Court.

He said he also became an ARTTs partner but did not receive the software that he was promised — he claimed that he was only shown a demo version of the program.

Moscow businessman Igor Sagenbayev did not make any payments to ARTTs, but he and a Ukrainian partner allotted more than 200,000 euros for a settlement center in Kiev. The center, Sagenbayev said, was set up as a joint stock company with a 51 percent stake for Sterligov, after which Sterligov wanted to name his own director without contributing a cent to the project.

Sagenbayev refused but did not take Sterligov to court.

“Besides the two partners that have gone to court, we have 29 partners who are working,” Sterligov said.

Representatives of ARTTs received the Bolshoi Biznes enforcement order on Wednesday evening, and when they tried to act on it Thursday morning, the company found that three of its accounts had been frozen, Sterligov said.

He said he had already paid the order from his personal account and that the court marshals had frozen his web servers Wednesday, as well. The company’s site was still down Sunday afternoon.

“I was forced to return from the woods unexpectedly to sort out the situation, and I believe that in the next one or two days the arrests on ARTTs property will be lifted,” he said.