When polluters go bankrupt: Reconstructing the status of environmental restoration claims and curator responsibility under Indonesian insolvency law

When a company holding an environmental permit is declared bankrupt, Indonesian insolvency law and environmental law collide. The Bankruptcy Law channels every claim through a curator‐administered verification procedure bound by strict deadlines, while the Environmental Protection and Management Law imposes strict liability for environmental harm without regard to procedural time limits. This tension became concrete in the 2023 bankruptcy of PT Ricky Kurniawan Kertapersada (PT RKK), a palm oil company that filed for voluntary bankruptcy after being ordered to pay approximately IDR 191.8 billion in environmental restoration costs to Indonesia's Ministry of Environment and Forestry (KLHK). The curator excluded KLHK from the list of creditors for late registration, forcing the state to seek recognition through a renvoi procedure. Using normative legal research combining statutory, conceptual, case, and comparative approaches, this article identifies two unresolved normative gaps: the absence of an explicit rule on where finalized environmental restoration judgements sit within the creditor hierarchy, and the absence of a curator duty to treat such judgements differently from ordinary civil debts during claims verification. Drawing on the Polluter Pays Principle and comparing Indonesia with United States, Chinese, Indian, and United Kingdom practice, including the risk that such claims are discharged or diluted through ordinary distribution, the article argues that finalized environmental restoration judgements should be treated as a distinct claim category subject to a proactive, rather than merely reactive, verification safeguard. It also situates the curator's responsibility within a comparative account of receiver and receiver‐manager liability and proposes amendments to Supreme Court Circular Letter No. 109 of 2020 to operationalize this reconstruction.