Bankruptcy stock buyer in Europe: private realisation from the estate, and who decides it

The estate is in one country, you are appointed in another

This is the case the market handles badly. The goods are in a warehouse in one member state, the appointment sits in another, the buyer is somewhere third, and every extra party in that triangle brings its own paperwork, its own language and its own reason for the deal to stall. A buyer who answers in one language and collects in one region is of limited use when the goods and the appointment are on different sides of a border.

We take the moving parts off your desk. You deal with one legal entity, sign one sale and purchase agreement, and get one payment. Where the goods physically sit changes the logistics, not the terms.

• One counterparty and one agreement, instead of a chain in which nobody in the middle is finally the buyer. What that changes about the number is set out on our overstock footwear page
• We arrange the collection from the site where the goods are held
• We deal with the warehouse or storage provider directly, in English, so you are not briefing a haulier across two jurisdictions
• We are the buyer, not your adviser. We do not comment on your procedure. What we hand over are the ordinary commercial documents of the transaction, and whether they satisfy your procedure is your judgement to make, not a promise for us to make

What has to hold up when the file is read a year later

You answer to a court, to creditors and often to a committee, so the real test is not the number in the offer. The test is whether the transaction can be reconstructed on paper months later by someone who was not in the room.

The general checks that apply to any buyer in this trade are listed on our sneaker stocklot page. The three below are the ones that decide whether a sale out of an estate survives being read back.

• A verifiable legal entity before disclosure: registration number, VAT number and a named signatory, sent to you in the first reply, so the counterparty named in your report is one you checked yourself
• Traceable bank payment, in full, received before the goods are collected, sent from the buyer's own company account and not from a third party
• A documented handover: signed manifest, loading confirmation and transport documents, so the quantities collected match the quantities already paid for

Bank transfer only. Cash is not a convenience here

Where a buyer offers bank or cash, the choice is presented to the seller as a service. For an officeholder reporting to a court and to creditors, cash is not a convenience, it is a line that cannot be reconstructed later.

We pay by bank transfer from our own company account, the full purchase price, before anything is loaded. A transfer carries a date, a sender, a beneficiary and a reference. It can be attached to a report and it can be checked by anyone who asks.

The documents that end up in your file, and when you get them

A report is read by people who were not in the room, so what counts is not what a buyer says about discretion but what you can put in the file with a date on it. You see every document before you send us a line of the stock list.

How the confidentiality undertaking and the resale restriction work is set out on our overstock footwear page. What follows is what each document does for your file.

• Mutual NDA as a PDF before the stock list is disclosed, signed and dated, so the moment at which information left the estate is documented. It binds both sides, which means the confidentiality you are giving is the confidentiality you are getting
• Draft purchase agreement sent with the offer and not after acceptance. The purchase agreement bars us from reselling the goods in your home market, and you read that clause before you sign rather than hearing it described afterwards
• Payment record: transfer date, sender, beneficiary and reference, set against the signed handover manifest, so the sequence of payment first and collection second is documented rather than asserted
• Nothing on this page is the contract. What binds is the wording in the signed purchase agreement, and you have that draft in hand before you commit to anything

When the estate holds more than one kind of goods

An estate is not assembled for a buyer. Branded footwear can sit next to shop fittings, office equipment and stock from a category nobody in this trade wants, and an offer to take all of it is worth less than it looks, because it can be repriced once the goods have actually been counted.

We take branded sport and lifestyle footwear and apparel. The rest of the buying filter, including the minimum lot size and the categories that get turned down, is set out on our page about what this desk does not buy. If the lot falls outside it, that answer comes within one working day rather than after a week of waiting for an offer that will not come.

• We buy lots, and we say it plainly: we do not commit to an entire estate before we have seen what is in it
• A mixed estate is workable. The branded footwear and apparel comes out as one lot, the rest stays with whoever else is bidding for it
• We price from a line list with articles, sizes and quantities. An inventory schedule written for the procedure is a starting point, not a basis for a firm number