Heliopark Group and Heliopark Hotel Management have filed for bankruptcy in Moscow Arbitration Court, a move that the group’s majority owner said he hoped would improve efficiency.
The group owns hotels and resorts in Moscow and several Russian regions, as well as in Ukraine and Germany. Heliopark Group is the company’s main holding, which includes Heliopark Hotel Management and Heliopark Hotel Development, according to the company’s web site.
The bankruptcy requests were filed to improve the holding’s efficiency, said Alexander Gusakov, who owns 52 percent of Heliopark Group. He declined to elaborate, saying only that the company and all of its hotels were still operating.
Since the start of the year, 25 lawsuits have been filed in Moscow Arbitration Court against the group, totaling about 107.9 million rubles ($3.7 million). Additionally, Moscow’s tax inspectorate No. 4 and ZAO Infinit have filed lawsuits seeking the bankruptcy of Heliopark Hotel Management.
A consultant who works on the hotel property market said the firm had already handed over its Heliopark Emmaus Club Hotel in the Tver region to creditors to settle a debt. The property is no longer listed on the group’s web site.
Last year, Heliopark Group had been planning to buy, build or renovate some 18 hotels by 2010, the International Financial Corporation said in a statement announcing its intention to buy a stake in the company.
The IFC planned to pay between $25 million and $27 million for slightly less than a blocking stake in the holding. It also expected to loan them $50 million and organize a syndicated loan for another $63 million.
The hotel company had been in financing talks with other funds, a source close to Heliopark Group’s management said, but they had to put off their plans because of the crisis.
Now it is easier to hand over assets that were used as collateral than to try to sell hotels to pay down debt, the source said. The group is using various tools to restore its financial health, including bankruptcy for individual companies, the source said.
The crisis has made such measures to settle with creditors increasingly common, said Vladimir Yurasov, a lawyer at Knyazev & Partners. But so far, there are virtually no court decisions in similar cases because of the time it takes to complete bankruptcy proceedings.
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