Provision of subsidies to small and medium-sized businesses in the context of the new coronavirus infection spreading: imperfection of legal regulation

In the spring, the Russian Federation, as well as the whole world, faced a global problem caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. In order to minimize the consequences of this pandemic, as well as not wanting to allow the mass spread of the virus, the President of the Russian Federation and the Government of the Russian Federation have introduced a set of restrictive and prohibitive measures of different content and orientation. First of all, these measures concerned the implementation of strict quarantine measures related not only to special conditions of movement, but also to the prohibition/restriction of the activities of enterprises and organizations in many areas of economic activity. The solution to the problems of fighting the virus is a set of response measures, so the state authorities almost simultaneously with the introduction of quarantine took care of financial support for a number of sectors of the economy, in order to prevent an economic catastrophe that could occur due to the predicted mass ruin of economic entities involved in these industries. The authors approve of the eternal will of the Russian President and the Russian Government to support the most affected industry in the context of a pandemic, but the practice of implementation of this support is in conflict with the will by reason of the defects of regulation, which in turn led to a situation which violated the rights of a particular business entities to receive the promised financial assistance. This work analyzes the legal practice of providing financial assistance in the form of subsidies to those businesses that the state most affected by the pandemic, and focuses on the injustice of normative regulation of the procedure this help.