Thai Bankruptcy Claim: The Two-Month Deadline Explained

ปรับปรุงล่าสุดเมื่อ 9 ตุลาคม 2569

เอ Thai bankruptcy claim has one deadline that matters more than any other: two months. When a Thai court places a debtor’s assets under absolute receivership, every creditor who wants to be paid has two months from the publication of that order to file a proof of claim with the Official Receiver. Miss it and you are, in almost every case, finished, no matter how good the underlying debt was.

Foreign creditors miss this window regularly. The order is published in Thai, in the Royal Gazette and in a newspaper, and nobody posts it to you. Supreme Court decision 5294/2568, handed down in 2025 and published this month, shows how little sympathy the Supreme Court has for a creditor who files late, even a government agency with a genuine reason for the delay.

How a Thai Bankruptcy Claim Actually Works

Thai insolvency runs under the Bankruptcy Act B.E. 2483. A creditor petitions the Central Bankruptcy Court, and if the court is satisfied the debtor is insolvent it issues an order for absolute receivership, the pithak sap det khat. From that moment the debtor loses control of its assets and the Official Receiver at the Legal Execution Department takes over.

The receiver then collects claims, examines them, and distributes whatever the estate holds. Nothing is paid to a creditor who has not filed. Suing the debtor separately does not help, because once the receivership order is made the court process is the only route. Our glossary entry on bankruptcy under the Bankruptcy Act B.E. 2483 sets out the stages, and การเลิกและชำระบัญชี explains the different situation where a solvent company is wound up voluntarily.

ขั้นตอน	ใครเป็นผู้แสดง	กำหนดเวลา
Absolute receivership order	Central Bankruptcy Court	On the petition
Order published in the Royal Gazette	Official Receiver	After the order
Proof of claim filed	Each creditor	2 months from publication
Report of debts owed to the debtor	Anyone who owes the debtor	1 month from learning of the order
Petition for leave to file late	Late creditor	No fixed period, but see below

The Two-Month Window Under Section 91

Section 91 paragraph 1 is short and unforgiving. A creditor must submit its claim to the Official Receiver within two months from the date the absolute receivership order is published. The claim can cover debts that arose before the order, including contingent and unliquidated ones, but it has to be filed in that window.

The clock runs from publication, not from the day you heard about it. For a creditor based outside Thailand, that means the two months may be half gone before anyone in your office knows the debtor has collapsed. Monitoring matters more than reacting, especially where you have ongoing exposure to a single Thai counterparty.

Dika 5294/2568: Three Years Late and the Claim Was Refused

The debtor was a construction contractor. In July 2016 the Central Bankruptcy Court placed its estate under absolute receivership. A government agency that had hired the contractor in 2009 to build a courthouse in Nakhon Pathom had terminated the contract in February 2015, reserving its right to claim damages. It filed a proof of claim in February 2017 for roughly 78 million baht in penalties, damages and interest.

Later the agency discovered something it had not claimed for. An independent inspection found structural defects in the ground-floor parking slab. The agency contracted repairs in December 2018, the work was accepted in August 2019, and the repair cost came to 8,638,840 baht. It told the receiver, and the receiver did not act.

The agency then petitioned the court for leave to file this additional claim, under section 91/1. It filed that petition on 2 September 2022, roughly three years after the repair figure was final. It argued that force majeure, including the COVID-19 restrictions, had prevented an earlier filing.

The Central Bankruptcy Court dismissed the petition. The Appeal Court for Specialised Cases affirmed. The Supreme Court affirmed again, and its reasoning is the part worth keeping.

Force Majeure and Section 91/1: A Narrow Door, Not an Open One

Section 91/1 lets a creditor who missed the two-month deadline ask the court for leave to file anyway. The creditor must show that force majeure prevented a timely claim. The section sets no deadline for making that request, and the agency read the silence as freedom.

The Supreme Court read it the other way. Where a statute fixes no period, the request must still be made within a reasonable time after the obstacle has ended. Force majeure excuses the original delay; it does not convert section 91/1 into a claim you can bring whenever you like.

On the facts the delay was plainly unreasonable. The agency knew of the defects in 2017 and 2018 and had a final figure by August 2019, before the pandemic began. Its explanation that it needed to verify the numbers internally was rejected, because the inspection and repair contracts had already fixed the loss. Three years of silence was unfair to the creditors who had filed on time and would have had their dividends disturbed.

There is a wider principle in the judgment. Bankruptcy exists to deal with the estate in an orderly way for all creditors at once, and to let the debtor reach a conclusion. Late claims cut against both aims, so the courts police them tightly. Compare this with ordinary civil อายุความ, which are generous by comparison.

A Live Example: The JKN Receivership Order

This is not a theoretical problem. The Central Bankruptcy Court made an absolute receivership order against JKN Global Group Public Company Limited, a listed Thai media business, on 25 August 2026. The Official Receiver’s notice was published in the Royal Gazette on 1 October 2026, and the two-month window for creditors to file runs from that publication.

Anyone holding a claim against that company, including foreign suppliers and licensors, has until approximately 1 December 2026 to file with the Official Receiver. Anyone who owes money to the company, or holds its property, has a separate one-month duty to report that to the receiver. The lesson of Dika 5294/2568 is that nobody will chase you, and arriving late with a good excuse is not a strategy.

What Foreign Creditors Should Do Now

1. Identify your Thai counterparties with meaningful outstanding balances and check the Legal Execution Department and Royal Gazette notices periodically, or ask Thai counsel to run that watch for you.
2. The moment you learn of a receivership order, fix the publication date in writing. Every deadline in the process counts from it.
3. File within two months even if your loss is not yet quantified. The Act allows contingent and unliquidated claims, so an estimated claim filed on time beats a precise claim filed late.
4. Gather contracts, invoices, delivery records and correspondence early. The receiver examines claims on documents, and a claim you cannot prove is a claim you lose.
5. If you are already outside the window, move immediately rather than perfecting your figures. The reasonable-time requirement starts running the day your obstacle ends.
6. Where the debt is still alive and no order has been made, ordinary การทวงหนี้ในประเทศไทย or a negotiated settlement is usually faster and recovers more than a bankruptcy dividend.

Directors on the other side of this should note that การปิดบริษัทในประเทศไทย correctly, through dissolution and liquidation, avoids most of this machinery, and our guide covers that route together with the ค่าธรรมเนียมศาล involved.

คำถามที่พบบ่อย

เกี่ยวกับผู้เขียน. This article was written and reviewed by Sebastien H. Brousseau, LL.B., B.Sc., who has been based in Thailand since 2004 and has run ThaiLawOnline since 2006. Our team acts for foreign creditors, suppliers and licensors dealing with insolvent Thai counterparties, from proof of claim through to distribution. If a Thai debtor has gone into receivership, or you think one is about to, ติดต่อ ThaiLawOnline before the two-month window closes.

Disclaimer: this article is general information about Thai law and is not legal advice. Deadlines in insolvency are strict and fact-specific, and the case summary above is based on the published report of the decision. Take advice on your own position before acting.