Rabobank International's (RI's) sale and leaseback deal with Moy Park Ltd
late last year was put together in record time, thanks to some very fast
teamwork between Rl Dublin and De Lage Landen.
When Moy Park Ltd, a food and poultry firm in
Northern Ireland, gave the go ahead for a GBP
7.5 million (EUR 8.8 million) saie and leaseback deal
arranged by De Lage Landen (part of Rabobank
Group) back in late November 2010, everybody
involved agreed this was an opportunity too good
to miss. Moy Park is a major player in the European
poultry market, and a company Rl wanted to do
business with. The only potential hitch was that
Moy Park wanted the sale and leaseback deal
done and dusted in less than two weeks. "What
we thought then was that we not only have to
do this, we can do this," says Rudy Scheffer, Senior
Relationship Manager International Business,
Financial Solutions at De Lage Landen.
And thanks to the cooperative efforts of both
RI's and De Lage Landen's credit departments,
De Lage Landen Asset Management and Global
Structured Finance, thefinancing of the deal was
approved in just three days, and the final deal was
signed in just over a week.
Of course it was a challenge, says Barry Flenry,
Flead of the Loan Products Group, Rl Dublin. "But this
is precisely the kind of cooperation we're looking
for. Moy Park was impressed that we got this done
so quickly. And that was only possible because
everybody worked so well together," Henry says.
In fact, the leaseback deal oniy happened because
Paul Doheny, RI's Relationship Manager for Moy
Park, asked De Lage Landen to join Rl at a meeting
with Moy Park last October. "Paul thought it was a
good idea to give Moy Park an idea of the leasing
products De Lage Landen could offer," says Aidan
Marren, Senior Manager, De Lage Landen Global
Structured Finance. "At the meeting itself, Rl was
actually bidding for a receivables financing deal,
but Moy Park was interested in what we could
offer on the leasing front," Marren says.
To cut a long story short, Rl managed to arrange
a first meeting with Moy Park thanks to RI's
relationship with the Brazilian office of the Irish
firm's parent company, food giant Marfrig. As it
turned out, there was an immediate chance of
some business, as Moy Park was looking for a
receivables financing proposal. "We came into that
bidding process a bit late in the day, however, so
we missed out on the receivables business. But
then Moy Park called and asked for a leaseback
proposal. We put together a proposal and sent
that to Moy Park in late October," Henry says. Moy
Park called back on 16 December and gave the
green light on the proposal, but said it wanted
everything signed and sealed by the 24th, which
gave Rl and De Lage Landen just seven working
days to finalise the deal. "We thought this is
something we really should be able to do. It's how
our cliënt coverage model is supposed to work.
But the credit approval process alone usually takes
between two and three weeks. The key in the end
was teamwork. Everybody simply did what they
were supposed to, and they did it very quickly,"
Scheffer says.
6 issue Rl WORLD
