Debtor businesses are increasingly trying to back out of debt repayment by going bankrupt, President of the Association of Regional Russian Banks Anatoly Aksakov announced at an interregional coordinating meeting in Yekaterinburg. The meeting was devoted to the economy’s real sector and the banking system’s developmental prospects as well as to toxic assets and bankruptcy laws.

Aksakov believes the most threatening thing is that a holding sometimes tries to transfer all the debt to one of its companies while withdrawing all the assets from it at the same time. This scheme is quite popular with the trading firms. According to the data available to the Association experts, the creditors (including the tax authorities) have already lost over 13 billion RUR after OOO Optovik had gone bankrupt. The company in question used to deliver goods to Eldorado consumer electronics and white goods chain store. 2.7 billion RUR and 1.2 billion RUR were lost due to Svyaznoy and Technosila’s bankruptcies, respectively. About 5 billion RUR got lost after Samokhval chain store (now known as Mercury) had gone bust.

‘All these cases are striking examples of how the existing bankruptcy legislation is simply inadequate,’ Anatoly Aksakov said.