February 2001
A daily grind for the restructuring mill
At worst, running a restructuring operation in Thailand can be a life-threatening métier, but its practitioners face a host of other obstacles, not least getting paid. Paradoxically, Thais are also seen as being too gentle and non-confrontational to buckle down seriously to the business of extracting debt from each other. On the buying side of the business, major players such as Lehman Brothers claim to be making a fair return on the distressed debt they have acquired.
From satellite communication companies to pineapple
canners, across the board Thailand's crisis-hit companies are
slowly being put through the restructuring mill. The Asian meltdown
seeped into every corner of Thai business, and just as the variety
of casualties is wide, so too are the approaches to rescuing them
or giving them a decent burial.
The term restructuring has come to cover everything from a cursory
one-year debt moratorium for mom-and-pop businesses to the
full-scale refinancing and reorganization of the country's largest
conglomerates. There are nevertheless common themes that stretch
across the whole process.
In 20 years in the restructuring business, Tony Norman, managing
director of restructuring specialist Ferrier Hodgson in Thailand,
has yet to meet a debtor who believes his problems are
self-inflicted. "It's either the fault of the government, the tax
man, the banks or God," he quips.
Norman, who is shadowed all the time by...
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