Americanas warns shopping malls that it will not pay late rent for physical stores

A Americans began notifying shopping malls where there are physical stores that rentals due by the date of approval of the request for judicial recovery, on January 19th, will not be paid, due to the effect of suspension of charges conferred by the judicial recovery. The company owes R$ 11.6 million to shopping malls spread across different regions of the country. In a statement, the company highlights that any payment of rent by January 19th “would imply creditor favoritism” and that credits prior to the recovery request has its enforceability suspended. Payments whose competence covers the period from January 20 to 31, 2023 will be made throughout this month. In a note, the company stated that “amounts of rent due and unpaid until the date of the Judicial Recovery request constitute debts that will follow the requirements of the process, which prevents it from making payments whose originating event is prior to the beginning of the request made . For events after the start of recovery, the company's operations continue as normal.”

In the list of creditors submitted to the Court, the ten largest creditor shopping malls account for almost 80% of Americanas' pending issues with the sector. The retailer's largest debt, R$ 2.6 million, is with Shopping Pantanal, in Cuiabá (MT), owned by the Ancar group. Next comes the Esplanada de Sorocaba (SP) shopping mall, owned by Iguatemi, whose backlog from Americanas is R$ 1.6 million. If this figure is added to the pending debt of R$ 741 thousand with Shopping Iguatemi in São Paulo, Americanas' debt with the group amounts to R$ 2.364 million. In third place in the ranking of shopping mall creditors is the AD Group, with R$ 2.103 million remaining, referring to the shopping malls Penha (R$ 1.170 million), ABC (R$ 660 thousand) and Praça da Moça in Diadema, São Paulo (R$ 273 thousand ).

For lawyer Diego Amaral, specialist in Real Estate Law and partner at Dias & Amaral Advogados Associados, the request to suspend debt collection is normal. “In judicial recovery, the idea is for the company to recover in order to be able to pay its creditors within an appropriate period of time. In two years, the company will organize itself to pay what it owes. However, most of the time, judicial recovery fails to recover the company and ends up progressing to bankruptcy. In this case, there is an order of debts that must be paid if there are credits to do so: debts from work and banks, among others, until reaching debts linked to civil relations, such as rental contracts”, he explains.

Also, this Thursday, the 16th, the company met with creditors to reach an agreement to pay debts. Americanas presented “a proposal contemplating an increase in capital in cash, with the support of its reference shareholders, in the amount of R$ 7 billion reais (considering the DIP financing already contributed that would be converted into capital), repurchase of debt by the company in the order of R$12 billion and the conversion of financial debts in the total amount of approximately R$ 18 billion reais, partly into equity and partly into subordinated debt. To date, there has been no agreement regarding the proposal presented”, informed the company.

*With information from Estadão Conteúdo