February 15 (SeeNews) - The extraordinary administration of Croatia's ailing concern Agrokor will ask the Commercial Court in Zagreb to extend by three months, to July 10, a deadline for the submission of a settlement deal, Agrokor receiver Ante Ramljak said on Thursday.
Before being submitted to the Commercial Court in Zagreb, the settlement proposal must be voted on by the creditors.
"We think that it will be impossible to vote on the settlement before April 10, so we have talked to the judge in charge and we will in the next 10 to 15 days seek an extension of the deadline for the submission of the settlement deal to court to July 10. We believe we can reach a settlement by then without a problem," Ramljak said during a session of the parliamentary economy committee aired on broadcaster HRT.
Once a settlement is reached, the extraordinary administration procedure, which began in April last year, will be terminated.
Ramljak also said that daily negotiations towards reaching a settlement are taking place with all the stakeholders in the process, but that legal procedures are delaying the actual vote.
"The problem is not with the creditors, they are ready to reach an agreement in the shortest possible time. Nobody intends to send the company into bankruptcy," Ramljak noted.
In December, Agrokor's extraordinary management unveiled a debt settlement plan under which the creditors and suppliers of the troubled concern will take full control of a new holding company and its units, to which the assets of the sound segments of the Agrokor group will be transferred.
The concern's extraordinary management has since divided creditors into groups ahead of the vote on the debt settlement. "The sorting of creditors and defining of groups is based on the records of claims filed and the differences in the legal position of each of the groups," Agrokor said in January.