PwC, ING Bank reach agreement on handling OW Bunker’s Danish assets: PwC

PwC and ING Bank N.V. have reached an agreement on the handling of Danish fuel supplier OW Bunker’s Danish assets, following the company’s collapse, PwC said in an email statement late Wednesday.

The agreement states that “the Receivers’ collections team based in Denmark will pursue all global receivables assigned and charged to ING.”

It also states that “all recoveries from receivables as at the point of bankruptcy will be paid into ING accounts and recoveries from currently uninvoiced OW Bunker Denmark sales will be paid into accounts controlled jointly by ING and the Trustees.”

Additionally, “the Trustees and ING have established a process to agree or have determined by a court which Danish receivables (if any) are not covered by ING’s security and are available to OW Bunker Denmark as unsecured recoveries.”

About 12 employees will be retained in Denmark to assist with the process, working alongside the trustees, receivers and their staff, and the trustees and receivers will consult and cooperate on issues relating to the receivables collection process and other matters where there are aligned interests, PwC said.

The trustees in this case refer to John Sommer Schmidt, attorney of Gorrissen Federspiel, and Pernille Bigaard, attorney of Plesner, were appointed as trustees for the bankruptcy estates, after OW Bunker & Trading A/S and OW Supply & Trading A/S (OW Bunker Denmark) filed for bankruptcy in the Bankruptcy Court in Aalborg, Denmark on November 7.

The receivers refer to the PwC employees, Paul David Copley, Ian David Green and Anthony Victor Lomas, of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP in London.

“This deal offers significant value for the unsecured creditors of OW Bunker Denmark. By working together with the receivers and ING, we aim to maximise recoveries from the group’s receivables base. That means that the chances of material recoveries for Danish unsecured creditors after repaying the banks are significantly improved, Bigaard said in the statement.

“The agreement also allows for an efficient way of determining assets which have properly been assigned and charged to ING and those which have not. This will reduce costs for Danish unsecured creditors and enhance recoveries,” Bigaard said.

On November 20, PwC announced it was the appointed receiver over the pledged assets of OW Bunker and that its UK and Singapore offices would jointly work to recover any pledged assets owed to OW Bunker wherever they may be in the world.

The audit company will also work alongside ING Bank N.V, a PwC spokesman said.

On November 7, OW Bunker in Denmark filed for bankruptcy protection, two days after it announced a loss of at least $275 million due to a combination of fraud by senior employees at Singapore subsidiary Dynamic Oil Trading and mark-to-market losses in the wake of collapsing global crude prices.

The Danish company claimed 7% of global bunker market share.

The company was publicly listed in Copenhagen in March and has since halted trading and been removed from the stock exchange listing.

Dynamic and OW Bunker Far East, another Singapore entity, have since gone into liquidation, according to Singapore’s Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority.
Source: Platts