"In the hands of lawyers, bad debt is transformed into filigree"

Pedro Cassiano Santos and Tiago Correia Moreira, partner and managing associate, respectively, in the Banking & Finance practice, are interviewed for an article on the Portuguese non-performing loans market, published in the March edition of Advocatus under the title “In the hand of lawyers, bad debt is transformed into filigree”.

Non-performing loans is not a new issue and has been a particularly hotly debated topic in recent years. According to data compiled by Debtwire, last year, the Portuguese NPL market amounted to eight billion euros, while Italian banks sold more than 100 billion and Spanish banks around forty billion euros of such assets. A slowdown in the market is not expected any time soon, given that European regulators continue to demand greater efforts, especially from those most exposed to this risk, such as the Portuguese banking sector.

Tiago Correia Moreira notes that banks are presenting ever more sophisticated teasers, namely, invitations to attract potential investors containing increasing amounts of information, such as market trends, which increase the value of the portfolio itself. “It’s like placing a portfolio in a shop window: if I’m a bank, I will want to make it more attractive”, sums up Pedro Cassiano Santos.

Tiago Correia Moreira concludes “we have a sophisticated and dynamic market, which is aware of the trends and the main challenges faced. It is able to connect with an investor from New York, that only wants to know how much it has to invest and does not want to worry about negotiating the SPA”.

Read the full article here.