Friday's Business section of The Times made interesting reading to us debt finance nerds. 

We had more news around the continuing saga concerning the Barclay family - until recently the owners of The Daily Telegraph. Here for once was a rare example of a bank electing to call in the receivers. Lloyds Banking Group has reportedly appointed AlixPartners as receiver over a Bermudian holding company that indirectly owns the Telegraph Media Group and The Spectator after failing to recover over £1bn in unpaid debts. An act of last resort it may have been, but a good reminder too that some lenders do have it within themselves to exercise their enforcement rights if their patience is tested.

And then I carried on reading over my morning coffee and came across news that the EG Group has been in discussions with its lenders around a three-year extension of roughly $3.4bn of fixed-interest loans. 

Seeking to amend and extend the term of a loan facility has been a popular option for a number of corporate borrowers for some time when faced with a mountain of debt and difficult circumstances in which to discharge those debts when due. Looked at from afar, such amends and extends do rather have the feel of kicking the can down the road on a troublesome debt pile. How much confidence do lenders on the receiving end of such requests have that a heavily-indebted borrower stands a better chance of repaying its debts later than the scheduled repayment date that they originally committed to? At a time when interest rates are rising, it seems difficult to argue that servicing debts will become any easier at least over the short to medium term. 

The obvious alternative to an amendment and extension exercise is to undertake a full refinancing. Whilst a refinancing may offer the possibility of agreeing more favourable lending terms with a different set of lenders (or at least better than those accepted under the terms of an existing loan when times were tough during the previous few years), refinancing can also prove expensive especially if existing debt documents contain repayment premiums or make whole fees. 

But amendment and extension exercises may be easier said than done. They can be more straightforward if an existing loan agreement already contains an extension option, or an accordion facility or the possibility of introducing a new tranche of debt to roll existing lender commitments. In recent years, we have heard of some borrowers using forward start loans - effectively, parallel loans which become available upon the maturity of an existing debt facility, and which existing lenders can choose to participate in. The downside of these forward start loans is that they can result in debt shrinkage if take up amongst lenders is lower than expected. 

Amends and extends can become trickier to execute when the existing loan terms do not contain an easy mechanic for pushing repayment dates out - in which case, a borrower can find itself having to undertake a difficult dance between what it would ideally like to achieve and what it can realistically persuade its lender group to accept. At that stage, a borrower will very much be reliant upon the willingness of its lenders to accept an extension and how positive a picture it can paint as to its financial position and future prospects.      

No doubt advisors to the EG Group have been toying long and hard over the points touched on above as they weigh up their options around how they amend and extend its debts. But one does wonder how long a borrower can keep opting to amend and extend before its lenders lose faith in the underlying business. At some point, the borrower will need to put its money where its mouth is. And if it cannot do that, well then there may be some more work for us restructuring lawyers to do - whether in the form of a loan write off or some kind of enforcement process of the kind now being undertaken by Lloyds Banking Group in relation to the Barclay family.