The bankruptcy moratorium, the oxygen ball approved in March 2020 and extended as the covid-19 crisis continued, comes to an end today without a new extension or a new bankruptcy law being processed, but with a new crisis in budding.
The focus may be on Abengoa, which without the SEPI bailout is headed for the largest creditor contest in the history of Spain, with 6,000 million in debt and 5,000 employees. But the SMEs that make up 98% of the business fabric warn that, without the extensions and the legal framework that speeds up and cheapens the processes, it is to be expected that there will be a sharp increase in business competitions in September.
Entrepreneurs with their business in a state of insolvency will have the obligation to request the formal declaration of insolvency proceedings and in the same way, the creditors, after more than two years of moratorium, may initiate said procedure to request the payment of their debts”, explains the management of SMEs Cepyme.
The increase in business closures will not begin to be noticed until after the summer, thus adding to the list of indicators that indicate that next fall will arrive with a host of conflictive situations from an economic point of view. According to Cepyme, during the month of September it will be when most of the procedures are presented due to the fact that August is a non-working month in the Mercantile courts and the term of two months for the voluntary presentation of the contest.
In this sense, the initiative agreed yesterday by United We Can with the PSOE to facilitate the survival of business projects that are still viable, despite going through a phase of insolvency, through the rescue by the workers themselves, constituted in labor company or cooperative, informs Vicente Coll.
The text indicates that workers interested in the succession of the company may carry out a proposal for the acquisition of a company in bankruptcy through the constitution of a cooperative, labor or participated company, and that this proposal will be prioritized when “the offer is equal or higher than that of the other alternative proposals presented, provided that this meets the interest of the contest, considering in it the continuity of the company, the productive unit and the jobs, among other criteria”
The way to avoid a radical increase in insolvencies will be the new bankruptcy law, which, although it was approved by the Council of Ministers on December 21, is debated and voted on today by the plenary session of Congress. The objective of the new regulation is to promote agreements between debtors and creditors before bankruptcy is declared, which ultimately means that fewer bankruptcy proceedings could be expected than there would have been under the previous regulation. For this reason, in the Association of Administrative Managers they think that many businessmen in this situation will wait for the new law to be approved to check if there are adaptation deadlines and to which law the next competitions will be accepted until the new law is fully in force. March.
The regulations regarding business competitions coincide with a Bank of Spain report on the financial situation of SMEs in which it indicates that small and medium-sized companies are already noticing the effects of the monetary tightening policy. Although financing via credit is not a “worrying” problem, the improvement in the degree of accessibility to bank credit has been interrupted by a notable increase in the cost of applying for loans. SMEs, according to the Bank of Spain, anticipate a deterioration in access to financing that they project at least until September.
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