Legal risks of creditors in the bankruptcy of organizations conducting foreign economic activity in the field of nature management and having obligations to foreign counterparties

Abstract

The insolvency of an organization whose business is concentrated in foreign economic turnover and connected with the use of natural resources places its creditors in a position where the basic bankruptcy risk is layered upon the cross-border location of assets and counterparties, the regime of currency restrictions, and the public-law obligations of the subsoil user that compete with registered claims. The discrepancy between the formally equal status of bankruptcy creditors and the actual distribution of the bankruptcy estate, in which the satisfaction of unsecured claims remains at about 8–9%, forms the core of the problem under study. The aim is to establish the structure of such a creditor's legal risks and to identify the conflicts arising at the junction of insolvency, currency control, and subsoil-use regulation. The formal-legal and comparative-legal methods, the method of systematic and teleological interpretation, the generalization of commercial-court practice for 2023–2026, and the method of legal modelling have been applied; the empirical basis comprised the current versions of the relevant normative acts, the rulings of the Judicial Chamber for Economic Disputes of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, and the statistics of Fedresurs for 2024–2025. It has been established that the creditor's risk breaks down into four heterogeneous layers – intra-bankruptcy, cross-border, currency-restrictive, and environmental – each of which reduces the projected depth of claim satisfaction at its own stage and lengthens the period of its realization. The leading character of the public-law liquidation and environmental obligations relative to the claims of bankruptcy creditors shows that a sustainable reduction of the risk is achievable by reconfiguring the priority order and the rules for recognizing cross-border claims, while the satisfaction of the creditor of a nature-management organization is determined by the consistency of all four regimes.