ARTICLE / CORPORATE LAW
The client is not paying under a public contract: recovering the debt
The work is delivered, the acceptance certificate is unsigned and the money has not arrived — and the contractor is left choosing between silence and a dispute with a state client.
- Published
- 2 November 2026
- Author
- Aleksey Sukhoruchenko
- Topic
- Corporate law
- Reading
- 5 min
Suppliers are afraid to argue with state clients for fear of ending up in the register of unreliable suppliers and losing the market. The fear is understandable, but the result is that the company finances the public purse out of its own working capital. Here is the sequence in which the debt gets recovered without the relationship with the client falling apart.
Payment deadlines are set by law
Under the law on the contract system, the payment period is seven working days from the date the acceptance document is signed. The same seven-day period applies to procurement from small businesses. A contract term providing for a longer period is contrary to the law.
Acceptance is carried out within the period set by the contract. The client is obliged either to sign the acceptance document or to send a reasoned refusal listing the defects and the period for putting them right.
It is in the refusal that the conflict most often hides: the client neither signs nor refuses, but asks for "reworking", relying on oral comments. Legally that is nothing; for the contractor it is months of waiting.
What to do when the client stays silent
First. Record delivery of the result. The acceptance document is sent through the unified information system, which keeps a record of the date. If the work was delivered outside the system, you need a covering letter with an inventory and proof of delivery, or a postal item with a description of the contents.
Second. Wait for the acceptance period to expire. Silence from the client after the period has expired is treated in court practice as evasion of acceptance, and a unilateral certificate acquires evidential force — this is expressly provided for by the Civil Code for construction and works contracts.
Third. Send a letter before action. Under the law on the contract system, the pre-action procedure is mandatory where the contract provides for it; as a general rule, for monetary claims in the commercial courts the pre-action procedure is mandatory. The time for a reply is thirty days unless the contract says otherwise.
Fourth. Calculate the penalty. For late payment the client pays interest at one three-hundredth of the key rate on the unpaid amount for each day. Separately there is a fixed fine for other breaches of obligations, the amount of which is set by a Government decree. The claim for the penalty is brought together with the claim for the principal debt.
The reasoned refusal and how to answer it
If a refusal does arrive and it has substance, speed matters. The reply must rebut each comment separately: what the technical specification required, what was in fact done, and what proves it.
A frequent story: the client raises requirements that were not in the technical specification. That is a dispute about the subject matter of the contract, and it is won by setting the text of the specification against the comments. An independent expert examination of the result helps here — its findings are hard to ignore.
If the defects are real, it is better to put them right and record that in writing. A court dispute about quality where the defects are proved is a losing position, whereas remedying them preserves both the money and the reputation.
Court
The claim is filed with the commercial court at the client's location. The court fee is calculated on the amount claimed and is recovered if you win.
What goes into the claim: the principal debt, the penalty as at the date of filing and running to the date of actual payment, the cost of the expert examination, and the costs of legal representation.
Timing: a first-instance hearing usually takes between three and five months, with another two or three for the appeal. A judgment on a monetary claim against a publicly funded institution is enforced through the treasury, and that is a separate procedure with its own deadlines — three months to pay after the writ of execution is presented.
About the register of unreliable suppliers
The contractor's main fear. It is important to understand that you do not end up on the register for a dispute about money, but for evading conclusion of a contract and for a material breach that led the client to terminate unilaterally.
If the client threatens to have you entered on the register in reply to your letter before action, that is not automatic: the decision is taken by the competition authority following a review, and the supplier has the right to put forward evidence of good faith. There are many cases in practice where entry was refused precisely because the contractor produced the correspondence and showed real steps towards performance.
What to do before the contract to make any dispute easier
Read the technical specification as the basis of a future dispute: anything described ambiguously will be read against you. Record every handover of the result in writing. Keep correspondence in the system, not in a messaging app. Know in advance who on the client's side is authorised to sign documents.
These habits do not remove conflicts, but they turn them into a dispute with a predictable outcome.
This material is for information only and does not replace advice on a specific matter.
If the client is not paying and the correspondence has reached a dead end, write to us — the first consultation is free of charge when you engage us.
Aleksey Sukhoruchenko — executive director of Kovalev & Partners LLC, lawyer
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