By: Vitor Ferrari and Ivan Kubala

In a judicial recovery process, it is practically certain that the company under recovery will have a multitude of creditors, which will certainly range from its employees to its suppliers, in addition, of course, to self-employed workers hired by it.

To continue the judicial recovery process, your role is to create a judicial recovery plan, within 60 days after the approval of the request, that pleases the representatives of all classes of creditors. This document will expressly determine the measures for the recovery of the company and, consequently, for the payment of credits.

As there is a large mass of creditors arranged in different classes, which are determined by the type of credit that each creditor has, the legislator understood it best to give preference to some of them, especially the most vulnerable in the relationship between creditor and debtor.

Before the creditors are divided into groups and the payment order is established, there is a differentiation regarding the credits. There are two types: extra-bankruptcy credits, which are those contracted by the recovering party after its request for judicial recovery, such as the fees of the judicial administrator; and bankruptcy credits, which arise from obligations agreed upon before the request for judicial recovery.

After selecting and distributing the credits into the groups mentioned, it is necessary to divide the creditors into classes, so that one class represents all individuals or legal entities that have credits whose origin is similar. In this way, all amounts owed to the company's employees will be included, creating the class of labor creditors.

The national legislation provides for 4 classes of creditors, who have different intentions and deadlines to receive their credits:

• labor creditors;
• secured creditors;
• unsecured creditors.
• and finally Microenterprises/Small Businesses (called ME/EPP);

In turn, the Union, states and municipalities are not subject to the effects of the Judicial Recovery, continuing to collect their credits, only meeting the need to submit to the Judicial Recovery Court when they are interested in withdrawing assets from the Recovering Company. However, the change in the Legislation brought the possibility of a tax settlement, a fact that in many cases will allow the payment of bankruptcy creditors and will guarantee the collection of taxes, a fact that we will address in a separate topic.

With the collaboration of Luis Felipe Simões.