La reforma de los acuerdos de refinanciación preconcursales

Abstract

The reform of pre-bankruptcy financial agreements carried out by Royal Decree-Law 4/2014 aims mainly at creating channels to facilitate that creditworthy and profitable companies, specially in the industrial sector, continue with their activity, provided the level of leverage is reasonable compared with the cash flows generated by their business. Refinancing agreements can be classified according to their effects into two big groups: on the one hand, refinancing agreements with ordinary effects, which include individual refinancing agreements, collective refinancing agreements and ordinary homologated (court sanctioned) refinancing agreements; on the other, refinancing agreements with extended effects, which include homologated refinancing agreements, which establish the implementation of the deferral to financial liabilities as a whole, and extraordinary homologated refinancing agreements, which may contemplate measures such as debt for equity swaps. Objections against this reform have however been raised due to the asymmetry and the differences, not only in content but, above all, in the design of the pre-insolvency refinancing agreements and the Spanish Bankruptcy Act, among other issues. This asymmetry is intended to be corrected, as far as possible, during the passage of the bankruptcy reform, which is now undergoing parliamentary procedure.