The owners of “Daughter-Sonny” will be undressed in a way that is not related
The bankruptcy trustee of LLC Pobeda, one of the legal entities of the bankrupt children’s goods network Daughters-Sonochki, on March 15 filed a petition with the Moscow Arbitration Court to bring the retailer’s owners to subsidiary liability to creditors in the amount of 1.48 billion rubles. We are talking about Vladimir Bondyashov, his son Alexander, and Tatyana Peregudova. The latter, according to SPARK-Interfax, is the owner of Pobeda. It was not possible to contact her. Bondyashov’s request remained unanswered.
Daughters and Sons have been operating in Russia since 1996. In 2020, this chain was considered the second largest retailer of children’s goods in terms of turnover (after Detsky Mir). Then the agency Infoline estimated its market share at about 3%. In 2021, the company already took 5th place in the ranking with a share of 1.6%, the retailer’s revenue decreased by 30% to 12 billion rubles. Last year, six operating companies of the Daughters and Sons group, and then the Bondyashovs themselves, were declared bankrupt.
The person controlling the debtor can be brought to subsidiary liability if it is possible to prove that the full repayment of creditors’ claims is impossible due to his actions or inaction, explains Dmitry Galantsev, managing partner of the Propositum Law Office. According to him, such debts cannot be written off during the personal bankruptcy procedure.
The expert adds that it can be beneficial for the network’s creditors if the former owners of the retailer had or still own any attractive assets. For example, it could be the Daughters and Sons trademark, the copyright holder of which is Vladimir Bondyashov. Creditors are also interested in the company’s own trademarks, especially those related to clothing for babies, says Antonina Tsitsulina, president of the Association of Children’s Goods Industry Enterprises. Intellectual property objects can be quite expensive, since de facto in the case of this company, the owner of the Daughters and Sons brand has the opportunity to restart this project, adds Galantsev.
How much the Daughters-Sonochki network owes to its creditors is not yet clear, since the process of forming a register of claims has not been completed for any of the retailer’s structures. But at the moment their total debt is at least 5.2 billion rubles. The owners of the company may be held liable for the entire amount, say lawyers interviewed by Vedomosti.
Among the reasons for the bankruptcy of the Daughters and Sons network, Tsitsulina names the company’s late decision to attract investors and a heterogeneous portfolio of bank loans. The retailer was also affected by the pandemic, as well as the inability to include it in the list of backbone enterprises due to the lack of a holding structure, the expert adds. Specialized chains of children’s goods are also experiencing large-scale difficulties since 2020 due to the strengthening of the positions of the largest marketplaces in this segment (primarily Wildberries and Ozon) and the reduction in the birth rate, says Mikhail Burmistrov, CEO of Infoline Analytics.
According to him, only Detsky Mir, which has a large portfolio of its own brands and is actively developing direct imports, is more or less able to compete with the largest online platforms among omnichannel retailers. While Daughters and Sons, Ship, Hamleys either went bankrupt or were sold to distribution companies. Offline sales of children’s goods are really growing weakly now, taking into account inflation, Marina Malakhatko, head of the CORE.XP retail department, agrees. According to her, over the past five years, this segment has experienced major changes, when some players have become even larger, while others simply left the market or began to work online.
