After a gruelling wait, the settlement has been accepted and another significant milestone along Agrokor’s rocky road has been reached.
“We’re finished, we need another two minutes for a final check before announcing the voting results,” said Judge Siladi Rstić at 15:00 today. The Agrokor settlement has now been accepted.
As Poslovni Dnevnik writes on the 4th of July, 2018, In the hall of the Dražen Petrović Basketball Centre (Cibona) in Zagreb, a hearing was held during which Agrokor’s creditors voted on the settlement within the process of the indebted company’s extraordinary administration.
Creditors with disputed claims also had the right to vote, meaning that most of the creditors had the opportunity to raise their hands and have their voices heard, so as mentioned, even those creditors with disputed claims were able to vote on the proposed settlement. That right was given to those who physically appeared today at the hearing, N1 reports. About 450 creditors were present today, including numerous lawyers representing dozens of them.
Since two thirds of the present creditors had to support the settlement in order for it to go through and succeed, it was important that those creditors collectively holding a total of 22.5 billion kuna in debt were for it.
“The amount of total undisputed claims stood at 25.3 billion. Today, voting rights were given to creditors who were dealing with up to about 8 billion kuna, so the collective amount of creditors with the right to vote was 33.7 billion, of which 31.8 billion, or 2,978 creditors were present here,” said Judge Siladi Rstić.
At the beginning of the hearing, Judge Siladi Rstić of the Zagreb Commercial Court told the hearing parties that today was the day to actually come and vote on the settlement, and not to merely discuss it.
As stated, the creditors present were those with the right to vote, who had unsettled claims in the amount of 23.35 billion kuna, which makes up almost 95 percent of these claims.
With regard to the large number of present creditors, more than 3,000 of them to be more precise, the Commercial Court in Zagreb foresaw the registration process lasting a couple of hours, but it ended up lasting for around three.
A total of 3,069 creditors had open claims with which they were able to vote at the hearing, of which 2,785 have an open claim exceeding the 1,000 kuna mark.
The voting took place in two phases, the first concerned the approval of the right to vote to the creditors with the disputed claims, and the other to the creditor’s vote on the actual settlement itself.
Due to the large number of creditors and claims involved, voting was not carried out by the classic raising of the hand process, but with the help of the “m2voting” application.
The settlement process ends at the time when the creditors or their representatives have signed a record of the hearing, and the results will be published in line with the judge’s decision.
As N1 has reported, there have been no objections. The representative of Zagrebački Holding complained about the amount of ZGH’s claims set out in the settlement text, claiming that they had not been paid all the above and the amount of claims had been reduced. As they calculated, the difference was 19.2 million kuna. Agrokor’s lawyer said that this was merely a “writing and counting error”.
Tomislav Orehovec, Ivica Todorić’s lawyer, expressed fears that there would be more cases like that of Zagrebački Holding to come. The judge replied that that was simply a misgiving.
