Arrest of Property in Bankruptcy Cases

Abstract

This article focuses on the analysis of certain aspects of the application of security measures in liquidation procedure governed by Bankruptcy Law.

Arrest of property (according to Ukrainian legislation terminology — a seizure of property) as a temporary tool of enforcing future court decisions is a fairly popular legal tool to protect the parties’ property interests in money disputes. In modern court practice application of this legal remedy creates some difficulties, particularly, in bankruptcy cases. When administering these cases, the judges sometimes consider petitions regarding imposing arrests of property or freeing restrictions over the property imposed in civil, administrative and criminal cases.

In such situations, there is a need to answer a question whether the commercial court in a bankruptcy case has a power to free arrests or other restrictions on using the property imposed by other courts. Current legislation i.e. both procedural law and bankruptcy law does not contain clear rules on how the judges should aсt in such situations.

Different approaches to the application of bankruptcy proceedings regarding arrest of property influence the court practice in general. Some economic courts establish that the release of the debtor’s assets from bans and arrests during the bankruptcy proceeding is totally in accordance with the current law, other courts rule that commercial procedural code does not allow to free property from arrest imposed, for example, in civil cases as this arrest is done by civil procedural law.

Arrests attached in the criminal proceedings have different nature and purpose. It is known that in most cases in the criminal law property arrest serves as means to ensure possible future confiscation of property that may have been obtained in an illegal way. During such court proceedings a special review is conducted in order to discover whether property in acquired legally. Therefore, in order to cancel arrest of the property the procedure should be exercised in accordance with the rules of the criminal proceedings. However, while imposing new arrests of property in criminal proceedings it should be taken into account that the legal status of a person who was declared bankrupt has changed, i.e. he is deprived of the right to dispose the property which becomes a subject for sale at public tenders.

The main conclusion of this article is that existence of certain different approaches to application of security measures in different court proceedings can be explained by the fact that during the development of procedural laws the nature of insolvency relations and the peculiarities of the legal mechanisms used in bankruptcy cases were not fully taken into account.