The insolvency legislative changes made in an untimely manner proved to be useless and ineffective, given that they were not applied because they were unconstitutional in some situations, Simona Milos, chair of the National Institute for the Training of Insolvency Practitioners (INPPI), said on Wednesday.
The statement was made after Minister of Finance Tanczos Barna said in January that it is necessary to amend the Insolvency Law for the recovery of some debts. According to the minister, the National Tax Administration Agency (ANAF) has to recover debts of RON 124 billion lei from companies.
"I believe in the accuracy of the figures. However, we do not ask ourselves the question: How was it possible for these tax claims to reach insolvent companies, as long as the tax creditor is the one who holds all the legislative levers for debt recovery in relation to the other creditors. It may be that an important part of this amount is receivables from bankrupt companies, in very old procedures, but which the tax creditor has not erased from its own records. As for the proposal to amend the insolvency legislation, we are all interested in the highest possible recovery of tax debts. Something needs to be done, but I would point out that, in the years that have passed since the entry into force of the Insolvency Code, there have been attempts to amend the legislation by the Ministry of Finance through emergency ordinances, without any kind of impact study, without parliamentary consultation and without consultation with the main actors of the insolvency proceedings, with the entrepreneurial community, with financial institutions and, last but not least, with the National Union of Insolvency Practitioners," Milos told the 11th edition of the "Insolvency Code" conference.
According to her, "all these legislative changes have finally proven to be useless and ineffective because they have been removed from application, either by declaring them as unconstitutional, Ordinance 91/2013, or by the mechanisms of issuing preliminary decisions by the Supreme Court of Justice and Cassation."
At the same time, she mentioned Decision 28/2018, which stated that "as long as the Insolvency Law and the Fiscal Code contain special provisions, each having its own regulatory field, but under the conditions of an insolvency and collective, egalitarian procedure, all creditors participate, including budgetary creditors who cannot enforce these claims outside this regulated framework".
"We are using this conference to invite the Ministry of Finance to dialogue. We can find solutions together to avoid these untimely changes that have thrown the insolvency proceedings into chaos. There would be a few suggestions. Firstly, we have a restructuring framework that also includes early warning tools, but the framework is totally non-functional. The tax authorities are the ones that have the most data about the financial situation of entrepreneurs and are the ones that could be the first to sound such an alarm. A solution would also be to encourage the budgetary creditor to assign its budgetary receivables so as not to remain in this insolvency procedure that drags on and lasts a long time," said Milos.
Representatives of central public authorities, specialist organisations and lawyers participated on Wednesday in the eleventh edition of the "Insolvency Code" conference.
The event was organised by Bursa Newspaper under a partnership with the National Institute for the Training of Insolvency Practitioners (INPPI) and the National Institute for the Training and Improvement of Lawyers (INPPA).
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