Franck, a major Croatian coffee and tea producer, said on Wednesday that Agrokor’s creditors’ council will likely not be established by July 10, the final deadline for the state-appointed crisis management of Agrokor to reach an agreement with the company’s creditors and suppliers to avoid bankruptcy.
Franck’s press release came after the High Commercial Court in Zagreb had ruled to accept complaints filed by 10 local and foreign creditors of Agrokor, which overruled the decision by a lower court to set up a council of company’s creditors based on their categorisation into five groups.
Setting up the council is a prerequisite for reaching a debt agreement deal with Agrokor’s creditors, which in turn is considered an essential part of the company’s orderly restructuring under its state-appointed administration which had taken over the company in April 2017.
Franck was one of the creditors who had moved to file an appeal, objecting to the Commercial Court’s decision to green-light a proposal that the creditors’ council would consist of five members, even though the council could have up to nine members. They also appealed against the way Agrokor’s many creditors would be categorised under the plan.
Franck is owed some 480 million kuna (€64.8 million) in bonds and cessions issued by Agrokor over the years, Dnevnik.hr reported in March. Agrokor’s total debt amounts to 58 billion kuna (€7.8 billion), with Russia’s Sberbank its single largest creditor with a €1.1 billion claim.
