According to Walter Barros, Recredit – an Angolan company that recovers bad debts in Angolan banks and restructures and revitalises credit assets – has already referred several insolvency proceedings to the courts, but to no avail.
"Insolvency proceedings are handled by the courts. At Recredit, we have some cases that have already been referred to the courts. The cases are running out of time due to the courts' activity", stated Walter Barros, in Luanda.
"Therefore, we cannot influence [the courts]. Our wish is for the cases to be faster, but the courts take their time to deal with these cases", he said, regretting that of the several insolvency proceedings referred to the courts "none of them have yet been concluded".
Speaking on the sidelines of the 1st International Conference on Business Recovery and Insolvency, in the country's capital, he considered that the insolvency and recovery process is the basis for the business system to function.
At the opening of this conference, the Secretary of State for the Budget, Juciene de Sousa, said that around 20 percent of bank loans in Angola are in default, and that this shows the urgency of consolidating effective recovery mechanisms and restructuring them.
Regarding the current percentage of non-performing loans in Angolan banks, Walter Barros said that this represents a significant burden on the Angolan economy.
Bruno Costa Pereira, a Portuguese judicial administrator and economist, argued that the lack of an agile system for recovering companies "harms the economy" and may also encourage unfair competition.
"And this, naturally, ends up affecting the ability of entrepreneurs to prosper, and therefore the challenges I see for Angola involve making the insolvency process more efficient and agile," said Bruno Costa Pereira, one of the speakers at this conference.
"What I have noticed is that insolvency proceedings [in Angola] are slow, court decisions take years to emerge, and, naturally, when this happens, on the one hand, it discredits the process itself", he concluded.
Experiences of Portugal and Brazil in insolvency proceedings and critical aspects of the insolvency framework in corporate recovery were some of the topics discussed at this international conference promoted by Recredit.
