Annual Meeting at the Annual Congress, Athens

This year’s meeting of the Financial Institutions Group will be taking place just prior to our Athens Congress at the Hilton Hotel on Thursday 4 October at 5.30pm, co-chaired by Alastair Beveridge and Florian Joseph.

The group has organised another session to share first-hand experience amongst members – Patricia Godfrey (former INSOL Europe President) will present on Carillion – a failed UK services business – and some of the challenges for financial institutions related to dealing with government and quasi government organisations. In addition, we would like to discuss the complications of Schuldschein-Financings in restructuring situations as experienced in the above situations and in general. We expect an interesting debate on this and many associated issues.

Spyridon Bazinas, a Senior Legal Officer at the International Trade Law Division of the UNCITRAL Secretariat in Vienna, provided an update on the recent reforms in Secured Finance Law in Europe. This covered a variety of different approaches in 6 different European countries where change has been enacted within the last 18 months or is planned in the short term. Mr Bazinas acknowledged that in this particular area of law reforms were typically behind commercial practice and always playing catch up - the pace of change in each country depended on the political will to make change and also the sophistication of the local judicial system. The common theme for most jurisdictions was simplifying and codifying the plethora of laws and rules as well as, where possible, using electronic processes to improve efficiency and reduce costs.
 
Our final topic related to ideas and proposals for the Group during the coming year and also for the next conference in Warsaw in October 2017.  The Group felt that one sensible approach would be to go directly to institutions using personal relationships/meetings and calls instead of emails with the objective of enlarging the group and then having a conference call to discuss options for the next session. Additionally, having a forum rather like the Academics Group where the attendees are lenders/financiers and not advisers (other than a couple of observers) may also work – we discussed the potential for a mid-year meeting somewhere central in Europe to facilitate a first such meeting, assuming it was supported by INSOL Europe.  All in all, a good meeting with lots of potential for the future.