The Center of Macroeconomic Analysis and Short-Term Forecasting has revealed the main tendencies of corporate bankruptcies according to the first quarter of 2021. Despite the fact that the number of insolvency procedures for organizations as a whole decreased by 8.6% compared to the first quarter of 2020, there were still sectors in which the number of bankruptcies increased. in particular, the number of bankruptcies increased in the areas of mechanical engineering (+5.8%) and construction (+1.3%).

Analysts also pointed out that the lifting of the moratorium on insolvency procedures, contrary to expectations, did not provoke an increase in bankruptcies. The fact is that many companies operating in coronavirus-affected industries have used the tool of judicial installment of debts. The mechanism allows for debt restructuring through the court despite the presence or absence of agreements with creditors. It is also possible that debtors tried to come to terms with creditors in pre-trial proceedings as bankruptcy procedures in Russia show low efficiency. But another reason could be just bureaucracy: it may take many months between filing an application for initiation of insolvency proceedings and the court decision, and that is why the statistics of the first quarter of 2021 turned out to be "silent".

The Center also noted that the number of creditors intending to bankrupt companies is also not too high. After the lifting of the moratorium from January to mid-March, only 760 reports were recorded, given that there are about 2,000 potential bankrupt organizations in the country. But despite this, the figures are still not comforting: the number of companies registered in the Unified State Register of Legal Entities has dropped to 3.4 million (-8.2%). At the same time, the decline has continued since 2016. But analysts explain that the reduction in the number of legal entities in the Unified State Register of Legal Entities does not necessarily indicate the "extinction" of business: the Federal Tax Service often excludes invalid or fictitious companies from the register.

After the moratorium on bankruptcy was lifted, there was no increase in bankruptcy filings of companies, and in the future we should not expect a sharp increase in the number of creditors' bankruptcy, says Mikhail Chernyshev, Head of practice a.t.Legal. Thus, the branch structure of the largest bankrupt enterprises allows to conclude that the pandemic of coronavirus had the most negative influence on trade, construction and machine-building industry. The expert also explains the absence of a surge of bankruptcies after the lifting of the moratorium by the fact that companies which have not survived the pandemic could file for bankruptcy themselves in 2020 or simply be liquidated without waiting for the accumulation of debts.

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