Americanas: BNDES activates loan guarantees – 01/23/2023 – Market

The BNDES (National Bank for Economic and Social Development) informed this Monday (23) that it activated the bank guarantees that guaranteed the two current loans with Americanas. The retailer filed for bankruptcy last week.

After the bails are honored, the state-owned bank says it will have no further exposure to the retailer. The guarantees are given by financial institutions as guarantees in the granting of loans by the BNDES. Thus, in practice, exposure is not to Americanas, but to guarantors.

The BNDES did not inform the value of the guarantees or which banks provided guarantees for Americanas’ loans, which total R$ 2.4 billion. Of this total, R$ 1.17 billion had already been disbursed by the development bank.

This Thursday (19), in the midst of a legal battle with its biggest creditors after the announcement of an accounting scandal, the company entered into judicial recovery to settle a debt of R$ 43 billion.

The company had not been accounting properly as debt credit operations to finance the purchase of goods from suppliers over the last few years, a strategy that became public last week.

The list of Americanas’ creditors should have been delivered to the court this Monday (23), but the company asked for another 48 hours, claiming that it only had access to the decision that established the initial deadline on Saturday (21), because of the São Paulo holiday. Sebastião, celebrated last Friday (20), in Rio de Janeiro.

In all, according to the company, there are 16,300 creditors, in the fourth largest judicial recovery in the country’s history (behind only Odebrecht, Oi and Samarco).

This Sunday (22), the reference shareholders of Americanas, Jorge Paulo Lemann, Marcel Telles and Carlos Alberto Sicupira, stated that they had never been aware of and would never admit any accounting maneuvers or dissimulations in the company.

“Like all other shareholders, creditors, customers and employees of the company, we firmly believed that everything was absolutely right,” said the three shareholders, who together own 30.1% of the company’s shares.

They were included by the CVM (Comissão de Valores Mobiliários) in the investigations into the case, in a process that investigates whether there was omission of relevant information in the first communiqué on the subject, released on January 11th.