Greensill Capital's financial saga never ends.
The creditors of the British company, including the Japanese SoftBank and the Association of German Banks, are claiming billions from the bankrupt financial company, announced Friday its administrator, the cabinet Grant Thornton.
And this, even as the hopes of taking over Greensill are dwindling since the negotiations with the American investment company Apollo to buy the intellectual property and the technological platform have failed, confirmed to AFP a source familiar with the matter.
Read also: Concern over employment in France after the bankruptcy of Greensill
The resounding fall of the financial corporation has multiple ramifications for its clients and lenders.
Become virtuoso of a form of factoring, the financial company, built by the Australian Lex Greensill in 2011, counted among its customers multinationals like Vodafone and Coca-Cola.
Meeting of creditors
Several procedures are underway in parallel since Greensill filed for bankruptcy in the United Kingdom where the bulk of its operational activities are located, but also in Australia where its parent company is registered and in Germany where it has a banking subsidiary.
The bankruptcy of Greensill is the consequence of an obvious overexposure of the company to certain customers and of a feverish financial package.
The finance company quickly paid the suppliers of its corporate clients, at a small discount.
Then she was paid later by the debtor company.
In the meantime, Greensill replaced part of these receivables in the form of securities.
The main client of the loans was Credit Suisse, which placed them in funds sold to outside investors, on the lookout for yield in a low-interest world.
To reduce the risk of default in the event of default, insurance was taken out for 75% of the portfolio.
Greensill had warned of the potentially "
catastrophic
"
consequences
if these insurance policies were not renewed, saying that some customers "
risked becoming insolvent
".
Creditors of parent company Greensill in Australia are now claiming A $ 1.75 billion ($ 1.35 billion), according to a statement from Grant Thornton, the figure was released following a meeting with 59 creditors, including SoftBank and Credit Suisse bank.
In 2019, the Japanese SoftBank entered the capital to the tune of $ 1.5 billion.
For his part, the boss of Credit Suisse said Tuesday that the priority of the bank, which reshuffles its asset management because of the scandal, remained to "
recover the funds
".
Creditors will meet again around April 21 and vote on the future of the group, which will go through a liquidation or an agreement to hope to recover some funds.
Grant Thornton specifies that 35 employees in Australia, the vast majority, have been made redundant.
Concerns in the financial sector and industry
At the same time, with the bankruptcy of Greensill's banking subsidiary in Germany, the association of German banks is claiming 2 billion euros as a creditor.
Since the beginning of March, Greensill has faced a criminal investigation into its German banking subsidiary after the German financial policeman found that Greensill Bank AG had misrecognized the assets of its largest customer, GFG Alliance.
Greensill Bank, whose assets are estimated at 4.5 billion euros, was placed in receivership on Tuesday.
The money of its private customers in Germany is protected, but this is not the case for dozens of municipalities and a region.
Read also: Threat of cascading insolvencies after Greensill's bankruptcy
Globally, Greensill's downfall has sparked a wave of concern in the financial sector and industry.
Its rout plunges its customers into great uncertainty, raising fears of a domino effect among companies that use its services to pay their bills, in particular the global empire of 35,000 employees of the GFG Alliance group of the Anglo-Indian billionaire Sanjeev Gupta.
Liberty Steel, which brings together GFG's steel activities, took over the Ascoval steelworks at the end of 2020, in Saint-Saulve in the north, and the Hayange rail plant in Moselle.
In this regard, the Minister of the Economy Bruno Le Maire assured last week that the State would protect employees in the event of difficulties.
Separately, in an investigation released Thursday, the
Financial Times
revealed the advisory role of former British Tory Prime Minister David Cameron, who lobbied the government for Greensill to get more state-guaranteed loans per year. last during the health crisis.
