Margarita Egiazarova speaks at the conference Business Way Forum “Labour Disputes in Russia”

On March 20, 2026, Margarita Egiazarova, Partner and Head of the Labour Law Practice at ALRUD, PhD in Law, moderated a session at the conference “Labour Disputes in Russia” organized by Business Way Forum.

In addition to moderation, Margarita spoke on the topic “Labour Aspects in Case of Employer Bankruptcy: Payment Issues”. In her speech, she told about a change of the vector in the law enforcement practice: today the problem is shifting from the situation "did not pay" to the situation "paid - and demand back." She noted that notwithstanding the formal priority of the employees as the second priority creditors, in practice, the bankruptcy estate is often not enough, and the priority in the ranking of claims is not equal to actual protection.

The next aspect of the report was the contradiction between the labour and bankruptcy legislation. Margarita emphasized that Article 137 of the Labour Code of the Russian Federation providing for the exhaustive list of deductions does not actually apply: the labour law prohibits return of wages, while the bankruptcy law allows such return as a consequence of invalidity of a transaction. As a result, the law enforcement remains fragmented, and there is no a unified concept.

Margarita paid attention to the established approach which considers an employment agreement and payments thereunder as the debtor’s transactions. In these circumstances, an employee is recognized a weaker party of labour relations due to asymmetry of evidence, and the burden of denying the existence of labour relations or proving non-performance of employment duties on the part of the employee is put on the official receiver.

“The practice has established that an employee who applied to court to assert his/her rights is in a more protected position than an employee who simply received a salary”, Margarita noted.