There are details of deferrals on loans for mobilized

A bill has been submitted to the State Duma that extends the right to defer payments on loans to mobilized owners of small and medium-sized enterprises. At the same time, the rules for all those called up are being clarified: debts on loans will not be written off from accounts and salaries, and the ban on opening bank cards for bankrupts will be temporarily canceled. Deputies can make this initiative the law already next week.

On October 7, the law on deferred payments for mobilized (including those with the status of individual entrepreneurs) and members of their families came into force. They received the right to apply to the bank until the end of 2023 with a request for a “vacation” for loans issued before September 21, 2022.

The duration of the benefit, during which interest will be accrued but not collected, is equal to the period of mobilization or participation in hostilities plus 30 days. If the soldier was treated for the consequences of a wound, this time is also included in the deferment period. Full write-off of debt on a loan for any amount is promised only to those who died from the consequences of injuries and injuries, and their families.

But less than a week later, it turned out that this law needs additions and clarifications, and it would be good to extend the “credit benefit” to other categories of mobilized. A group of deputies from all Duma factions and two senators proposed giving the right to deferral of loan payments also to small and medium-sized businesses.

The conditions are spelled out in the submitted bill as follows: it must be an LLC of one mobilized participant who simultaneously single-handedly manages a business registered before September 21, 2022, and the accounting report for 2021 or the first half of 2022 must be non-zero. Validity of “holidays” and here will be equal to the period of mobilization plus 30 days. Fines and penalties that have accumulated before the entrepreneur was mobilized are not written off, but fixed and frozen – until better times.

Unlike citizens who took loans not for doing business, mobilized businessmen who died are not guaranteed full debt cancellation. According to the authors, the government should be given the right, if desired, to establish a “maximum amount to be terminated” of such debt agreed with the Central Bank. Moreover, this amount may depend both on the type of loan and on “regional characteristics”. It is forbidden to demand payments on loans from guarantors-guarantors for the duration of the “holidays”.

“An analysis of the current legislation allows us to conclude that the activities of limited liability companies included in the register of SMEs, whose sole participant acts as the sole executive body (as a rule, the general director) and was drafted into the armed forces on mobilization, may actually be blocked”, – the explanatory note says. The statistics given in the document are as follows: LLCs – SMEs with a single male owner not younger than 18 and not older than 60 years old, who simultaneously perform the functions of the sole executive body, in Russia now 797 thousand (35% of all small and medium-sized enterprises).

And now about the proposals that concern all the mobilized without exception.

First, it was decided to clarify the situation with the missing. The “grace period” will be extended if the debtor is recognized as “missing” – up to the cancellation of this decision by the court due to the discovery of the missing person or declaring him dead, the bill says.

Usually, the court recognizes as “missing” a person whose place of residence has not been known for a year, and declares dead after five years. An exception is made for those who disappeared under circumstances that threatened death (for example, during natural or man-made disasters), and give reason to assume death from an accident: their court may recognize them dead in six months.

As for military personnel or civilians missing in connection with hostilities, their court may declare dead no earlier than two years “from the date of the end of hostilities”, and in such a situation it is not necessary to recognize such a person as “missing without a trace” before that …

Secondly, the draft law proposes to ban banks from writing off those called up from their accounts during the mobilization period, and employers from deducting money from their salaries according to writ of execution. A member of the debtor’s family can also apply for the suspension of the write-off by attaching a paper on the participation of the mobilized “in hostilities.”

But “a mobilized person may not directly participate in hostilities, but be engaged in ensuring order, for example,” admitted one of the authors of the initiative, the head of the Duma Committee on the Financial Market, Anatoly Aksakov (“SR”), in a conversation with MK. “Changes will be made to the text by the second reading and we will correct this wording, as well as some others,” he assured.

In this case, we are talking only about debts on loans. The problem of tax debts, fines, payments for housing and communal services, court decisions on the recovery of funds in compensation for damages or alimony will apparently be regulated by another bill, which is currently only “discussed” and not written, Mr. Aksakov said.

And, finally, the ban on opening new accounts for bankrupts and receiving funds for them for the mobilized is planned to be canceled under normal conditions – otherwise it “is not possible in a timely manner” to bring the payments due to such military personnel to them, the authors explain.