Administrative and legal mechanism of state control in the sphere of insolvency and bankruptcy of nature-using organizations under conditions of ensuring environmental safety

Abstract

The insolvency of nature-using organizations creates a distinct zone of vulnerability within the system of environmental safety: the administrative and legal mechanism of state control, designed for an operating and solvent entity, loses its enforcement capacity where the debtor's assets are insufficient and activity ceases. The study aims to establish the limits of this mechanism's effectiveness in relation to nature users undergoing bankruptcy procedures and to determine the conditions for its coordination with the insolvency and environmental legal regimes. Formal legal, comparative legal and teleological methods are applied; the current versions of Federal Laws No. 248-FZ, No. 7-FZ and No. 127-FZ, the reviews of judicial practice of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation for 2023–2024 and statistical data on the insolvency of legal entities for 2020–2025 are used. It is established that raising the threshold for initiating a case to 2 million roubles and the decline in the number of corporate procedures narrow the field of insolvency control over the fulfilment of environmental obligations; claims for compensation of environmental harm placed in the general register regime remain unsatisfied where the bankruptcy estate is insufficient; resistance to insolvency is possessed mainly by the regime of advance financial provision under Article 56.1 of Federal Law No. 7-FZ. The persistence of the reactive nature of control means that environmental safety in this segment is achieved by shifting regulatory effort to the stage preceding insolvency rather than by intensifying the supervisory burden.