SUNWAY TRAVEL COMPANY STARTS BANKRUPTCY PROCEEDINGS

The travel company that worked in Yekaterinburg for 15 years and was known as Cleo-tour and Tour-Box, was taken under surveillance. The company, the closure of which due to the pandemic caused a scandal in the tourist industry market, filed an insolvency claim.

RusBankrot published a material about the company at the end of March.

When filing a bankruptcy petition, the Sunway indicated the debt to creditors in the amount of 41,684,256 rubles and 64 kopecks. The application was recognized as justified on June 10. Now the company is ‘observed’ by the interim manager Vyacheslav Filipians from Perm, and the Court continues to receive claims from creditors with requests to include them into the register of the creditors’ claims.

The founder of Sunway Maxim Puzankov promised that all obligations to counterparties and clients would be fulfilled.

Travel agencies that worked with Puzankov noticed that the company ceased to transfer money even before the start of the pandemic, at the end of 2019. Having received no funds for early booking, the tour operators complained to the police. As a result, the debt to companies amounted to 31.7 million rubles, but the accounts of the company had less than 1 million rubles. What is more, the company has no other property.

The report of the interim manager will be considered by the court on October 28. Whether 800 families from Ural will receive some compensation in the process of bankruptcy is a big question, given the lack of financial guarantees (the company has not been listed in the federal register of tour operators).

A number of experts believe that the case of Sunway will be far from the only one in the tourist services market.

Many suggest that 2021 will bring this sector of the market a wave of bankruptcies, which did not happen last year due to the moratorium declared by the authorities. In addition, another wave of pandemic brings significant risks due to the new restrictions on business.