ST.PETERSBURG IS RANKED THIRD IN THE RATING OF CORPORATE BANKRUPTCIES

The first quarter of this year brought 177 organizations of St. Petersburg the status of official bankruptcy. Due to this, the city took third place in the list of regions with the largest number of bankrupt legal entities and farms. If we rely on the data of Fedresurs website, then St. Petersburg in the tacit competition was bypassed only Moscow and the Moscow region with 467 and 186 organizations, respectively. All of them were declared insolvent.

Along with the negative impact of the pandemic, the economic situation in the country affects the overall growth in the number of corporate bankruptcies, say the experts. Over the past six years, the number of companies receiving the appropriate status has been growing by 20% every year.

However, in the first nine months of 2020, corporate bankruptcies declined by 19%.

Lawyers note that the total number of corporate bankruptcies in January-March of 2021 also decreased significantly when compared with the same period last year. In St. Petersburg, this decline reached 8.3%, and in the country as a whole, the number of bankrupt organizations and peasant farms decreased by 8.1%. Experts call the moratorium announced by the authorities in connection with the pandemic in 2020 the reason for this dynamics.

According to the data presented on the website of the Federal Tax Service of the Russian Federation, at the beginning of October 2020, 517 thousand legal entities and more than 1.6 million individual entrepreneurs were under effect of the moratorium. In fact, this means that more than 14% of all organizations and more than 40% of private businessmen were protected from sudden bankruptcy.

What is more, the policy of the Central Bank, which established incentives for the additional creation of reserves by April 1, 2021, is among the reasons for the decline of the number of bankruptcies.

However, experts note that not everyone was able to take advantage of the restructuring of loans.

Many organizations, for which the lifting of the moratorium was too sudden, may go bankrupt by the end of December 2021. This opinion is expressed by Elena Kozina, a representative of the "ELKO Profi" legal firm.