Garrigues creates a Restructuring & Insolvency Department, cementing its position as the leading provider of integral legal advice to distressed businesses

The growing economic significance of business refinancing transactions and insolvency situations in the current climate has led Garrigues to create a Restructuring & Insolvency Department offering integral legal advice on these types of transactions.

The new Restructuring & Insolvency Department will cater to the needs of distressed businesses on a joint and coordinated basis. The new structure will allow the Department, which will boast a multidisciplinary professional team of lawyers and economists, to offer enhanced support services to companies in difficulty, as the analysis and design of optimal solutions from the financial, labor and employment, corporate/commercial, real estate, tax and litigation standpoints will be centralized in one single practice area.

According to data from the National Statistics Institute, the number of concurso proceedings, formerly known as suspensiones de pagos (Chapter 11-type proceedings), has increased exponentially in Spain since the onset of the crisis there. At the start of this summer, 1,727 formal insolvency orders had been made, up 173.7% on the 631 recorded in the same period last year.

The new Department will be headed by Antonio Fernández, currently the partner in charge of the Insolvency Area, an area of expertise in which Garrigues has been the market leader over the last few years.

Antonio joined the Firm in 1985 and boasts an international reputation as a specialist in cross-border financial crises and in offering value-added legal solutions to distressed businesses. His experience ranges from the coordination of far-reaching refinancing and business restructuring processes to the re-floating of business lines, the implementation of financial and labor/employment solutions, mergers, distress transactions, advice to executives, concurso proceedings and liquidation processes, among others.

With this new structure, Garrigues aims to offer the market and its clients the benefit of the experience amassed by its professionals in dealing with the economic crisis, as well as build on such expertise, both in-house and externally.