Over the past several years, unitranche facilities have become increasingly prevalent. This growth has been driven by the ever-growing class of private credit and direct lenders who initially developed the unitranche facility structure, along with traditional bank lenders now joining this market. The unitranche structure has several advantages, including typically quicker execution for the parties involved and in some cases a lower cost of capital to the borrower.

Secured lenders are troubled at the recent news that a New York state court judge denied a preliminary injunction request filed in the Supreme Court of New York by a group of dissenting first-lien lenders, seeking to prevent a borrower, Serta Simmons, and certain first-lien consenting lenders from entering into a recapitalization transaction. In exchange for the purchase of the consenting lenders’ debt at a discount, the consenting lenders received new super-priority debt ranking ahead of the non-consenting lenders’ debt.

La Ley 27/2014, de 27 de noviembre, del Impuesto sobre Sociedades (“LIS”), aplicable a los periodos impositivos iniciados a partir del 1 de enero del 2015 introdujo importantes novedades en relación con el régimen especial de neutralidad fiscal aplicable a las operaciones de reestructuración (“Régimen Especial”).

Entre otras, el Régimen Especial ha quedado configurado como el régimen aplicable por defecto a estas operaciones, no siendo necesario optar por su aplicación (sin perjuicio de la obligación de comunicar la realización de la operación a la Administración Tributaria).