Deal Maker of the Year Awards 2012 WINNER - GERMANY
DEAL: Blackstone acquires portfolio from Level One Group
NAME: Christian Kohler-Ma COMPANY: LEONHARDT Rechtsanwaelte POSITION: Partner ADDRESS: Kurfuerstendamm 26a, 10719 Berlin, Germany TEL: +49 (0)30 88 59 03-0 FAX: +49 (0)30 88 59 03-100 EMAIL:
c.koehler-ma@leonhardt-rechtsanwaelte.de WEBSITE:
www.leonhardt-rechtsanwaelte.de
BIO:
Christian Koehler-Ma has been partner for 17 years at LEONHARDT Rechtsanwaelte, one of the leading crisis management and insolvency law firms in Germany. He specializes in insolvency administration and has handled major insolvency cases such as Systracom Bank AG (internet brokerage), Gameplay Deutschland GmbH (electronic/internet games wholesale/retail/ development), Kraftwerks-und Anlagenbau AG (nuclear power plant engineering), Borsig GmbH and Borsig Holding AG (waste heat systems engineering), ddp Nachrichtenagentur GmbH (news agency), Rösch AG (medical technology), Berliner Symphoniker e.V. (symphony orchestra), I-D Media AG (internet advertising), Axxonis AG (pharmaceutical r&d) and Global Solar Energy Deutschland GmbH (solar panel production).
Christian Koehler-Ma received his legal degree from the Free University in Berlin and was admitted to the Berlin bar in 1989. Additionally he spent one year at the London School of Economics and two years as a McCloy Scholar at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, where he received his Master of Public Administration. He is the author of several publications on restructuring and insolvency and regularly speaks at conferences and industry events on German insolvency law and its uses. In addition he holds a teaching position at the Wildau Polytechnic (TH Wildau - Technical University of Applied Sciences).
FIRM PROFILE
LEONHARDT Rechtsanwaelte rank amongst the leading law firms with regards to insolvency law in Germany. Our restructuring advice benefits from our vast experience and ground-breaking insolvency cases our firm has previously been
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involved in. Our experience in insolvency law and restructuring goes back about 90 years. More than 25 qualified German attorneys and corporate lawyers work for LEONHARDT solicitors as insolvency practitioners.
The German Insolvency Scene
It has been hard to obtain consistent information on available liquidity in the German market over the past year. Representatives of small and medium-sized businesses have complained about a credit squeeze, but lenders – savings and loans associations and savings cooperatives especially – have claimed that loans are freely available. With regard to private equity investments and other merger and acquisition activities, the picture is similarly checkered. Company insolvencies fell by 5.93 per cent from a total of 31,998 in 2010 to 30,099 in 2011. At the end of the first quarter of 2012 they stood at 7,483, which on an annualized basis would be nearly at the level of 2011 (-0.55 per cent). In comparison, the historical all-time high was hit in 2003 with 39,320 company insolvencies. With the euro crisis seemingly dragging on forever, market participants are divided whether they consider an ECB – engineered soft landing possible or whether another major crash is more likely. Even if the crash can be avoided, an uptake in corporate insolvencies is expected.
As in the US and France, the law which is do deal with this debtor-in-possession is found in one major code: the Insolvency Code of 1999, recently revised on 1 March 2012. Proceedings are started by a filing in the insolvency court that has jurisdiction, which is always a local court at the lowest level of the civil law system. While some German states concentrate that jurisdiction in
one or a few courts, with the insolvency court in the city state of Berlin handling the most cases in Germany, in other states – notably Lower Saxony, Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg – jurisdiction can fall to very small courts with little insolvency experience. However, the recent reforms have introduced major changes which begin to impact all courts behavior by strengthening debtor-in-possession proceedings while also giving creditors much more influence.
Germany is a signatory to the EU Insolvency Regulation but has not adopted the UNCITRAL Model Law. In general, it recognises the effects of foreign proceedings unless they violate fundamental principles of German law (Section 343, Insolvency Code). For any proceedings to which the EU Regulation applies, the general rules of international insolvency (Sections 335 to 358, Insolvency Code) are supplanted by that Regulation. However, recently there have been few significant cases with an international angle, the main one being a decision by the Federal Supreme Court, which decided that international jurisdiction for a company that stopped trading would be in the country of its centre of main interest (‘COMI’) when it stopped trading. With the reforms outlined above, the trend for COMI shifts to England or for the use of English schemes of arrangement seems to have ended.
AREAS OF PRACTICE
Insolvency & Restructuring Corporate / M&A Labor Law Notary Public
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