Google halts bankruptcy proceedings in Russia due to failure to pay record fine

Google halts bankruptcy proceedings in Russia due to failure to pay record fine



The Ninth Arbitration Court of Appeal in Moscow suspended the bankruptcy proceedings of the Russian legal entity of the American Google at the request of Roskomnadzor, sent due to the fact that Google Rus did not pay a turnover fine of 21.7 billion rubles, a representative of the department told Vedomosti. The decision on the fine was made by the court in the summer, having received the relevant protocol from Roskomnadzor.

“At the request of Roskomnadzor, the Arbitration Court suspended the introduction of surveillance in relation to the Russian legal entity Google LLC,” the representative of Roskomnadzor specified.

The corresponding decision was made by the Ninth Arbitration Court of Appeal of Moscow on September 26, indicated in the file of arbitration. It was issued under the bankruptcy lawsuit of Google Rus. The Russian subsidiary of Google filed a bankruptcy petition on June 16 with the Moscow Arbitration Court.

“This is due to the non-payment by the American IT company Google of the assigned turnover fine of 21.7 billion rubles for the repeated failure to delete illegal information,” a Roskomnadzor representative told Vedomosti in response to a request about the reasons for filing a petition with the court.

Vedomosti sent a request to the press service of Google.

The decision to collect a turnover fine of 21.7 billion rubles from Google was made by the justice of the peace for the Tagansky district of Moscow on July 18. It was a record fine against an IT company in Russia. Part 5 of Article 13.41, according to which the court then ruled on a fine for Google, concerns the repeated failure to remove information prohibited in Russia. For legal entities, it implies liability in the form of a turnover fine in the amount of 1/20 to 1/10 of the income of the person being fined for the previous year.

“The court does not have information about the payment of this fine,” a representative of the Tagansky District Court of Moscow told Vedomosti.

For Google, this was not the first fine under this article in Russia - in December 2021, the same court ruled to recover 7.2 billion rubles from Google. The American company repaid this fine, Roskomnadzor reported earlier.

According to lawyer Marina Lukyanenko, Google has a good chance of appealing this decision. "An administrative fine is not an obstacle (the bankruptcy process - Vedomosti"). The main thing is that the financial position of the company meets the requirements of a bankrupt. There are nuances only in the order of debt repayment in the form of an administrative fine, "she noted. According to her, in Russia there is jurisprudence and clarifications of the Supreme Court on similar cases.“However, at present, jurisprudence in connection with the current situation issues unexpected decisions,” Lukyanenko added.

“Non-payment of the fine is not an obstacle to the introduction of surveillance. Relatively speaking, if a company has only an obligation to pay an administrative fine (at least 21 billion rubles), but there are no other obligations that have not been fulfilled for more than three months, then there are no grounds for introducing a bankruptcy procedure, ”Valery Zinchenko, senior partner of the board agrees with her lawyers at Pen&Paper.

“From the definition of the introduction of monitoring, it clearly follows that Google has significant receivables in addition to the Roskomnadzor fine,” Zinchenko concluded.



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