GetBack
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
GetBack, founded in 2012 in Poland, was one of the country's fastest-growing debt collection companies. It bought portfolios of unpaid debts — mostly overdue bank loans and unpaid telecom and energy bills — for its own account or for cooperating investment funds, and then pursued the debtors. The debt purchases were largely financed from external funds, including corporate bond issuance, and total liabilities grew from PLN 223.9 million in 2014 to nearly PLN 3 billion in 2017. By March 2018 it was a major actor on the Polish debt collection market — and one of Poland's largest financial scandals.
02 / GetBack FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
GetBack collapsed under bond-funded growth: in April 2018 it defaulted on a PLN 70 million bond payment, Fitch cut it to restricted default, and trading was suspended. Auditors later found executives had falsified financial statements, using new bond money to cover old obligations. The bonds had been sold to over 9,000 individuals as safe as bank deposits; bondholders lost more than PLN 2.5 billion. A June 2019 composition agreement imposed 25% repayment of unsecured claims over eight years.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Operations ended
GetBack failed to redeem ~$25M of bonds at end of April and trade in bonds/shares was indefinitely suspended:
- Asset restructuring
after fraudulent events detected in 2018, restructured management applied for accelerated restructuring (przyspieszone postępowanie układowe); Wrocław District Court opened proceedings on 8 May 2018. Company ESPI 60/2018 (2 May 2018) filed the application under Polish Restructuring Law (Capitea archive).
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
Buy unpaid-debt portfolios with bond money
- 02
Liabilities balloon from PLN 224M (2014) to PLN 3B (2017)
- 03
April 2018: bond default; trading suspended; executives arrested
- 04
Restructuring; 9,000+ bondholders recover only 25%