My contractor has gone bankrupt: the steps, your rights, and what the register says

A bankruptcy is not site gossip: it is a judgment of the Enterprise Court (tribunal de l'entreprise), which appoints one or more trustees in bankruptcy (curators) and a supervising judge. As long as that judgment does not exist, a company you cannot reach is a company you cannot reach, which is a different problem and is settled in another way.

The judgment is made public in three ways. Extracts from it are published in the Belgian Official Gazette; the complete file lives in the Central Solvency Register, RegSol, which is the electronic platform for bankruptcies and judicial reorganisations; and the trustee writes to the creditors it knows of, which presupposes that the company entered you in its books.

The Crossroads Bank for Enterprises carries the information as a legal situation, a field separate from the "active" or "ceased" status. Two entries there look alike and say the opposite of one another: the opening of a bankruptcy is a beginning, the closure of a bankruptcy is an end. The date beside the entry is therefore as important as the entry itself.

From the judgment onwards, the trustee administers the company's assets, verifies the liabilities, realises the assets and pays the creditors in the order of any rights of preference they hold. The FPS Economy puts it bluntly from the customer's side: payments to the company stop, and every payment is made exclusively to the trustee.

A bankruptcy does not automatically terminate the contract. The FPS Economy describes the steps in this order: first check with the trustee whether it intends to carry on with the contract, before calling in another company. A job taken over too quickly can be paid for twice.

The statement of claim is filed electronically in RegSol, at the latest on the day provided for by the judgment declaring the bankruptcy. It is the judgment itself that fixes that date, within a period the Code of Economic Law caps at thirty days from its delivery. The documents the claim rests on are attached to it: the signed contract or quote, the invoices, the proof of payment.

The trustee does not pay in order of arrival but in the order laid down by law. A private individual who has paid a deposit has in principle no security: the claim is unsecured, that is, ordinary. The FPS Economy writes it this way: repayment of a deposit can only come after the preferential creditors have been paid.

What is left after them depends on what the liquidation releases, and it happens that the assets do not even cover the costs of the proceeding — the court then orders closure without distribution. That is why a large deposit paid at signature is, in a bankruptcy, the most exposed sum in the contract.

Once the deadline for filing has passed, all is not lost for all that: a late creditor may still apply for admission of the claim up to one year from the declaratory judgment, without being able to call into question distributions already ordered. Beyond that year, the creditor is barred as against the estate. Filing does not make you paid; not filing puts you out of the game.

The first is the Breyne Act, which governs, among other things, a building contract, a sale on plan or a turnkey contract for a dwelling, where the future owner pays money before the work is completely finished. It provides for a compulsory financial guarantee that comes into play where the company fails to perform, bankruptcy being the example cited by the FPS Economy itself.

The Act still has to apply, and that is where a great many jobs fall outside the frame: it does not apply where the owner concludes separate contracts with several contractors — one for the structural work, one for the roof, one for the heating — nor to work carried out in a dwelling the owner already owned. Ordinary renovation most often falls into that second case.

The second exception is compulsory ten-year (decennial) liability insurance, described in the guide devoted to insolvency: it is taken out with an insurer, and it is the insurer who remains bound when the company disappears. The certificate handed over before the work starts carries the name of the company and the number of the policy; kept, it is still usable years later.

Afterwards the question always comes back: was it visible? Sometimes, yes, in the form of dates. A judicial reorganisation opened and then closed, a change of seat, the cessation of an establishment unit, annual accounts filed late at the National Bank's Central Balance Sheet Office: these are dated facts, public and free, which the guides on this site explain how to read one by one.

But no Belgian register announces a bankruptcy to come. The KBO/BCE holds no cash position, no order book, no late payment to a supplier; RegSol only opens at the moment of the judgment, so too late for the deposit. The absence of an adverse signal before signature was not a misreading: it was the real state of the source on that date.

That is also what Domara can and cannot do. The service reports what an official source said, with its date, and stops there: it predicts no failure, rates no company, and a legal situation displayed is never a judgment about the people behind it.