Bankruptcy bidding: legal issues of antitrust regulations

Abstract

This article is devoted to the legal issues of preventing the restriction of competition in bankruptcy bidding. The author notes that the correlation between bankruptcy and competition protection legislation is a "gray zone" of Russian bankruptcy law, which at the theoretical level very rarely refers to the mechanisms of antitrust control. As a result of the conducted research, the author comes to the opinion that antitrust control in bankruptcy bidding may be a necessary element of public control over the sale of property, if such sale may affect the state of competition in the commodity market; at the same time, antitrust control in bankruptcy bidding is carried out ad hoc. Based on the analysis of judicial practice, the author identifies the following conditions imposed by the current legislation on protection of competition on the conduct of bankruptcy auctions: (i) stage-by-stage realization of the debtor's property in bankruptcy proceedings; (ii) inadmissibility of restriction of competition in the course of auctions (inadmissibility of concerted actions, inadmissibility of creating obstacles to participation in auctions, entering false information about the subject of the auction); (iii) compliance with the procedural requirements for the realization of the debtor's property (compliance with the following requirements).

References

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