Our restructuring and insolvency work is at the heart of our practice and is the core of everything we do. Our turnaround and restructuring team has many years of experience in major restructuring and insolvency projects. We have provided our services to leading companies in the real estate, retail, metallurgic industry, the ply industry, the textile industry, the porcelain industry, all-purpose shoe industry, the leisure industry and the banking system.

We can introduce new management to provide leadership to the business during the turnaround or restructuring phase. Acknowledging that existing management teams may lack experience in turning around a business, we introduce experienced turnaround professionals who can step into executive not only advisory roles in the business, such as chairpersons, CEOs, CFOs, and chief restructuring officers; operations, marketing, and non-executive directors.

The ad-hoc mandate is a confidential procedure initiated by the Debtor in which an ad-hoc attorney negotiates with the creditors in order to reach an agreement with one or more of them, which will resolve the Debtor's financial difficulties.

Under strict confidentiality, we can act as an ad-hoc attorney appointed by the court, upon the request of the Debtor. Our aim is to reach an agreement between the Debtor and one or more of its creditors within 90 days after our appointment.

Abraxas provides loan monitoring services to lenders and borrowers of capital in the commercial, industrial, and real estate sectors ensuring an orderly, timely and accurate flow of funds between lenders and borrowers during the implementation of the agreed performance/ recovery strategy and thereby minimizing the lenders risk exposure.

The prerequisite of a successful monitoring is the preparation of robust financial projections for the troubled businesses or a strong recovery plan which will provide the benchmark against which the borrower's performance will be judged.

The receivership or the administration of the property of others is a procedure whereby the agent can enforce security of a creditor against a company's assets in an effort to obtain repayment of the secured debt. Under the Romanian law, in case of failure to fulfill the secured obligation, the secured creditor is entitled to take possession of the debtors' assets for administration purposes.

We can help the secured creditor by taking over the mandate of agent or administrator of the assets based on an administration contract. The assets to be administrated could be one or more goods or a patrimony.

We can help clients with strategic financing advice with regard to the company's funding options and we can also manage its funding relationships. Our member firms' independence from the providers of financing products enables us to provide wholly objective advice. The key factors to ensuring that the long term growth objectives are met are the deliverability and structure of debt.

Our independence also allows us to provide expert transaction execution across the full spectrum of debt products:

Our team with extensive corporate finance, legal and turnaround expertise could advise you throughout the complex processes of buying, selling or restructuring financially troubled companies, in order to achieve maximum value.

Our Distressed M&A team assists potential investors with assessing such opportunities, including:

We help the stakeholders of businesses which are underperforming, in distress, or experiencing a cash crisis to resolve strategic, operational, and financial issues.

Timely and expert advice is critical to stop and reverse a downward spiral. Early detection, assessment, planning, communication, and decisive action are the keys to restoring performance and rebuilding value and success.

The preventive concordat (or, simply, the concordat) is an agreement concluded between the Debtor and its creditors which hold at least two thirds of the accepted and undisputed receivables against the Debtor, by which these creditors and the Debtor agree on a plan to restructure the Debtor’s business and to re-pay its debts.

Where businesses are underperforming, in distress, or in crisis, we provide tailored business review services either for financial stakeholders or for the business itself. The business review provides a clear view of the position, the problems and the options, which are a pre-requisite to support decision-making. Financial stakeholders have concerns about a business they have an interest in and wish to appoint an independent consultant to review that business and its perspectives. Businesses need to better understand the reasons for their underperformance and the available options.

Company directors, lenders or financial institutions interested in a business can face issues such as high borrowings compared with the ability to generate cash, risk of breach of banking covenants or borrowing limits, facilities due for renewal, against unfavourable market conditions or poor trading performance, deteriorating cash flow performance. These issues may lead to a need to reconfigure the balance sheet.

When the management of a company or the shareholders become aware that a subsidiary or a division of a company/factory is under-performing and decide upon its closing, ABRAXAS assists them to identify the best exit option.

We arrive on the scene to create and implement an exit strategy that maximizes recovery for all creditors and shareholders - while minimizing costs and future liabilities.

In identifying and selecting alternative project financing options, Abraxas also aims to make full use of available state aid so as to optimise project costs. We help businesses obtain exemptions from taxes and tax incentives for research and development and environmental protection.

An important area of our competences is support for foreign and national investors in negotiating state aid packages. We have participated in multi-stage negotiations with national and local government representatives to obtain the best terms of assistance for planned investments. We also support our clients in applying for aid from Community programmes and in finding partners for the implementation of international projects.

Sofia Mînzatu – Law Office is a full service corporate and commercial law office located in Bucharest and founded in 2006. It offers a wide range of legal services related to corporate recovery, including financial restructuring and reorganisation, distressed M&A, financings, investigations as well as traditional administration, liquidation and bankruptcy appointments.

The main services provided by our correspondent law office are: