13,000 firms insolvent in first nine months

The number of companies that went insolvent in the first nine months of the year rose 26% against the similar time in 2008, with most of them operating on the retail market, according to data supplied to ZF by the Romanian Trade Registry Office (ONRC). At the end of September, 12,845 companies in Romania, with hundreds of millions of euros in cumulated turnover, were subject to the Law 85/2006 on insolvency proceedings. The arrearage, which occurred in the context of the economic crisis and the shortage of cash faced by increasingly more companies, are the main reasons behind the rise in the number of companies that went insolvent this year. “The decline in consumption, in demand on external markets, the difficult access to financing, have rendered large companies insolvent, companies that would not have ended up in a similar situation otherwise. Things will not improve in the first half of next year, and we are likely to see quite big companies filing for insolvency,” says Arin Stefanescu, president of the National Union of Insolvency Practitioners in Romania.