International Debt Restructuring Seminar held by Gide Loyrette Nouel

On 30 March 2012 Gide Loyrette Nouel (GLN) held a seminar on International Debt Restructuring involving Ukrainian Companies: Options for Creditors and Obligors. The seminar brought together leading legal practitioners of Gide Loyrette Nouel - Tim Theroux, counsel of Gide Loyrette Nouel Moscow and expert under English law, Grigory Marinichev, partner of Gide Loyrette Nouel Moscow and a leading Russian insolvency and restructuring practitioner, Igor Krasosvkiy, senior sssociate of Gide Loyrette Nouel Kyiv, representatives of foreign and Ukrainian banks acting on the Ukrainian market, representatives of investment banks as well as the wider Ukrainian business community.

The event included in-depth presentations on various practical aspects of multi-jurisdictional debt restructuring techniques with a special focus on challenges and legal hurdles creditors of Ukrainian obligors are likely to face. Tim Theroux provided insight into the general principles of restructuring under English law governed documentation and available options for creditors; Igor Krasosvkiy focused on the challenges and legal constraints accompanying restructuring of Ukrainian companies and discussed out-of-court and formal insolvency procedures under the new Bankruptcy Law; Grigory Marinichev delivered a case study providing participants with cutting-edge practical tips for multi-billion dollar cross-border restructurings.

According to Bertrand Barrier: "Restructuring is not a trendy topic that emerged from economic turmoil as some get used to think but rather a process known and evolving for more than 2,000 years. That is the very reason why the topic always attracts attention and interest of financial community and corporations. The idea behind the seminar was not only to guide the participants through best international practices for conducting workouts but also to share our hands-on experience and present a roadmap navigating Ukrainian creditors and companies across the reefs at each stage of the turnaround process. A special emphasis has been placed on a number of important novelties introduced by the amended and restated Bankruptcy law which are due to come into effect in January 2013. Surprisingly, but those provide for quite a few attractive options for creditors and debtors among which are debt-to-equity conversion, hive downs, cram down, the new pre-insolvency court-supervised restructuring, etc”.

Igor Krasovskiy also added that: "The seminar suggests that clich? approach to the restructuring process has come of age and may no longer bring fully satisfactory results to banks and corporations. Instead, the market is already hungry for and will seek an ‘out-of-the-box’ solutions in the forthcoming future. Therefore, the discussed idea of restructuring based on the scheme of arrangements under English law may become very interesting for Ukrainian companies sooner than one may tend to believe".