ATHENS: Famar, a pharmaceuticals company in the Marinopoulos Group, will be the first Greek firm that US fund KKR includes in its Pillarstone corporate loan restructuring platform.
Famar’s inclusion is aimed at restructuring the company’s existing loans of 150 million euros, refinancing it with a fresh injection of 40 million euros, and then finding investors for it.
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This will be the first experiment, and there are several more in the pipeline. The two banks involved, Alpha and Eurobank, have already started discussions with KKR about their next proposals for management of bad corporate loans, with three or four companies already having been selected from the long list of firms with nonperforming loans. They are enterprises from the sectors of mining, food and shoe retailing.
Although the exercises among the two Greek banks and Pillarstone – the European bad-loan management platform headed by John Davison – have studied a large number of companies, the selection process remains hard and strict. The main criterion for consideration is the indebted companies’ sustainability, which points to dynamic corporations with an export orientation.
Pillarstone does not target small enterprises, as the companies’ minimum borrowing must be 50 million euros, while the model is based on cooperation with banks, given that most companies have loans issued from the country’s four systemic lenders.
