Cabinet of curiosities: what unusual items are found in bankruptcy estate?

At the last stage of bankruptcy, rather strange objects and items, by selling which the settlements with creditors take place, are sometimes found in the bankruptcy estate. Bankruptcy trustee seeks to consider all possible sources, including both tangible and intangible assets of the debtor.

The pravo.ru portal has interviewed experts, listing the exhibits of the original ‘cabinet of curiosities’ from the objects that got into the list of bankruptcy estate objects In some cases, obligations have to be paid off from the sale of monuments of religious significance (for example, a church building), in others - at the expense of condoms or household items such as a kettle.

In the first case, an example is the bankruptcy case of an entrepreneur Natalia Kupryukhina, who declared insolvency in 2019.  After the bankruptcy trustee proceeded to take an inventory of the woman's property, it was discovered that she owned the building of the Assumption Church located in the Tula region (case No. A68-11355 / 2019).

It is curious that before that, the representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church did not show much interest in the building and did not try to buy it out from Kupryukhina.

The building was put up for auction (where a resident of the capital bought it for 186 thousand), but the Belevskaya diocese of the Russian Orthodox Church tried to challenge the deal, demanding to transfer the object to it.  However, there was no legal basis for this, and on December 23, 2020, a contract with the buyer was signed.

In another bankruptcy case of the ‘Delta’ company (case No. А60-3558 / 2017), which was engaged in retail, the trustee decided to sell the goods that were in circulation.  In June 2018, it became known that the vibrating rings, playing cards, condoms and a batch of 14,000 cigarette lighters were put up for auction.

In September, the maximum price (45 thousand rubles) for all the items included in this lot was offered by Sergey Engoyan, the head of a law firm from Yekaterinburg.  How exactly the Ural lawyers dealing with bankruptcy cases will use all the purchased goods is not reported.

Alive creatures also become objects of bidding at the stage of bankruptcy proceedings.  For example, in the case of the Gelendzhik Oceanarium (No. А32-40193 / 2016), a blacktip shark was put up for auction.

It was bought for 218 rubles by a publishing company that sells newspapers and produces advertising brochures.

The situation with the inhabitants of the farms turns out to be more complicated.  In one case, the trustee has to sell alive minks (case No. А40-65727 / 10), since an enterprise that raised animals for fur production goes bankrupt.  In another case, pigs and suckling pigs become the objects of sale (case No.A33-3753 / 2020).  It is a luck if they are on the farm and you do not need to look for them in the neighboring fields and forests in order to save them from hunger on the eve of the autumn cold weather, as was in the bankruptcy case No. А56-144752 / 2018 of a farmer Olga Kurilova.

In the process of bankruptcy of a plant that produced equipment for the defense department, the tanks, exhibited as monuments in the city squares, can also get into the bankruptcy estate.  This happened in the bankruptcy case No.A09-6094 / 2020, where the dispute between the manager and the administration of the city of Bryansk, referring to the impossibility of selling the T-34 as an object of historical heritage, reached the 20th AC and THE cassation.

Cryptocurrency had become an unusual asset included in the bankruptcy estate in recent years.

Such a situation occurred in the process of recognizing the insolvency of Igor Tsarkov, who owned bitcoins.  Moreover, the lack of regulation of cryptocurrency transactions in Russia leads to diametrically opposite decisions of the judiciary. The capital arbitration rejected the claim of a bankruptcy trustee in the case (No.А40-124668 / 2017) to include bitcoins in the bankruptcy estate, but the 9th AC did not see any obstacles for creditors to receive payments in digital form.  It is clear that without the participation of the debtor himself, it will not be possible to receive assets.  Therefore, experts say, in such cases, judicial acts obliging bankrupts to provide passwords for accessing cryptocurrency wallets in the presence of a notary appear more and more often.