THE LAWYERS OF KREMLIN FOUND SHORTCOMINGS IN THE NEW BANKRUPTCY LAW

The State Legal Department of the President (SLD) gave its assessment to the draft law on bankruptcy prepared by the Ministry of Economic Development. A letter containing comments on the document has already been sent to the Government of the Russian Federation.

We should recall that the reform of bankruptcy legislation was initiated at the beginning of this year, the Ministry of Economic Development was actively working on it.

As part of the changes, it was supposed to abandon three bankruptcy procedures at once - supervision, financial recovery and external management, replacing them with a debt restructuring procedure.

At the same time, according to the lawyers of the SLD, such a drastic change could have a detrimental effect on the industry, and it takes time for the practice to take shape, and the mechanisms of the new procedure should become clear to the participants in bankruptcy cases.

The proposal of SLD specialists is to leave the procedures for financial recovery and external management for the next two years, simultaneously introducing debt restructuring.

In addition, the initiative to give the tax authorities a right of being a pledge lender raised questions. We are talking about the possibility of tax authorities to become pledge creditors of the debtor's property in the presence of the latter's debt to the budget.

According to the Kremlin lawyers, the provision should be discussed with creditors, experts and business representatives once again.

By the way, private lenders and large banks have already spoken out against such an innovation. According to the representatives of credit organizations, in the event of the introduction of a tax pledge, banks will simply stop giving loans to businesses.

Thus, now the finalization of the draft law will be carried out at least until the end of the year, which means that the adoption of the law is postponed to 2021, which also delays the moment of its entry into force.

There is also a positive side of this decision - next year, after the lifting of the moratorium, a wave of bankruptcies is expected, which is better to go through with already established and familiar rules.