Winding Up is 9fin's weekly newsletter, incorporating summaries and commentary from our European distressed coverage for the past week. Find out more about what we do for distressed here.

Greetings again from the Big Apple! This week 9fin has met with restructuring practitioners in New York to get a taste of what’s to come in Europe. The restructuring market in Europe is like America’s little brother — companies are learning how to be more aggressive with liability management exercises and creditors are learning how to defend themselves with co-op agreements.

It’s been a struggle to mimic historically due to the cultural differences, the practitioners said. Europeans tend to try to avoid being antagonistic in order to maintain relationships in a comparatively smaller market to the US. However the tides are changing with more and more US style transactions appearing in Europe.

Altice France creditors were the first to adopt a co-op agreement in order to fight back against the company’s planned discounted transactions. This week 9fin reported on the second case in Europe with a crossholder group of Ardagh’s bondholders signing a co-op agreement as it engages in talks with the company on how to deal with its maturities after 2026.