The agreement with Sberbank on Agrokor debt is expected to be signed next week, said crisis manager of the food giant Agrokor, Fabris Peruško, on Thursday (March 15).

Russia’s Sberbank is the biggest creditor of the debt-ridden Agrokor, owning around 1 billion euros of its debt.

Peruško, who replaced the previous crisis manager Ante Ramljak in February, made his comments after a meeting with Agrokor’s suppliers. The government-appointed crisis management’s main goal is to reach an agreement with hundreds of Agrokor’s creditors and debtors, in order to save the company from bankruptcy.

According to the special law passed for this purpose, the deadline for the agreement is in April this year, or July, if a clause allowing a three-month extension is agreed.

Speaking on Thursday, Peruško said suppliers are the key element in reaching an agreement.

“Within this process in the last year, the suppliers have been the only creditors of the whole process who received payments, and it is essential for everyone involved to take care of suppliers, so they could continue to function within this system. This is the message we will take into the second round of negotiations next week, and we believe we will be able to complete the framework for the agreement,” said Peruško.

On Wednesday, Agrokor published a docoument called Entity Priority Model (EPM) which put the estimated value of companies in the Agrokor conglomerate which is available for creditors is between 1.8 and 3.8 billion euros.

According to the same report, some 530 million euros of debt created before the crisis management took over in April last year would not be written off but inherited by the restructured company.

Privately-owned Agrokor employs around 60,000 people across southeast Europe and before its debt crisis started in early 2017, its annual revenues stood at around 7 billion euros or almost 15 percent of Croatia’s national output.