Supreme Court of the Russian Federation specified how to deal with the claims of an affiliated creditor

The Economic Board considered the case on the complaint of a creditor, whose claims were subordinated by the district court.  In the first two instances, the claims were included in the register of creditors’ claims without subordination, as the courts found no grounds for it.  However, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation did not agree with any of the colleagues and made a decision to reconsider the case.

The essence of the dispute boiled down to the inclusion of debt in the register of creditors’ claims. The debt was formed as a result of the repayment of a multimillion-dollar debt by an individual who was a guarantor under a loan agreement with a bank. The main borrower in the case was the debtor company. The courts of first and appeal instances satisfied the guarantor's claim. However, the board of the district court found the fact of affiliation between the applicant and the debtor proven and downgraded the claims.

The position of the Supreme Court of Russia was as follows.

An important criterion for downgrading claims in the register of a debtor controlled by a creditor was the presence of a property crisis of the latter at the time of concluding a disputed agreement.

However, there was no such defining feature in the case under consideration. At the same time, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation noted that the creditor's claim could not be satisfied in a situation where a subsequent compensation from the debtor was received in accordance with the agreement concluded between the parties.

Other creditors drew the attention of the courts to the transit nature of the movement of funds within a group of companies, the beneficiary of which was the guarantor. But these arguments erroneously were not evaluated by the courts.

As a result, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation cancelled all three resolutions and demanded that the issue be reconsidered by correcting the errors (decision No. 307-ES19-23448 (3) dated February 3, 2022).