Pubs in the Molenstraat remain open: owner Khalid Oubaha has managed to save his catering empire. ‘I stood on the edge of the volcano, looked down and thought I was going to fall.’ The good outcome means he can now start working on new ideas for the entertainment street.

He has survived. For sixteen months, the survival of Khalid Oubaha’s hospitality empire hung by a thread. The largest hospitality entrepreneur in the Eastern Netherlands has been successful in reaching an agreement with his more than 200 creditors. On Tuesday, the Gelderland court approved this rescue plan, effectively a deal in which creditors would only be reimbursed for a small part of the outstanding bills.

‘It’s still so unreal,’ the Nijmegen hospitality tycoon rejoices. On Tuesday afternoon, he learned that his company had been saved. The court approved a settlement with his creditors. ‘That was so stressful,’ he describes the many months in which the end threatened for his K.O Company. ‘It still feels very strange.’

The weight of the 17 million euro debt which his company had been carrying since the Covid pandemic has fallen off his shoulders.

On Tuesday, he was waiting nervously at home when he got the long-awaited message at around 13:20. ‘I was very hopeful. An agreement had been on the table for several weeks. But you are never 100 percent sure whether the court will actually sign it off. You think: surely nothing will block it? In last summer’s rescue plan, an agreement also seemed to have been reached, but things still went wrong. That was such a huge disappointment. And now this. Incredible!’

Full steam ahead

Personally, the news has given him a huge boost. ‘I’d only just heard the news, but I immediately started calling everyone. I’m planning to get all my staff together for a party soon. They went through it all with me. We will definitely be celebrating this. And then full steam ahead for the holidays.’

‘I would love to organise a kind of Amsterdam Dance Event in Nijmegen’

‘We already have a good business, but we still have lots of new ideas. And we’re going to work on those together. I want to organise a kind of Amsterdam Dance Event in Nijmegen, but then nearly every weekend. That’s really exciting.’

The entrepreneur is immensely grateful to his administrator Tian Herstel. The down-to-earth, calm lawyer from Doetinchem and the flamboyant restauranteur might not seem to have anything in common. ‘But inside, we’re the same. Tian is very straight. We’ve also been very clear to each other at times.’

The administrator did live up to his name (‘Herstel’ or ‘Recovery’, ed.), Oubaha agrees, laughing. ‘Tian has a mega-companion, David. A silent force, a really great calculator. They did a great job.’

Viable

Administrator Herstel is also satisfied with the outcome. ‘A team of six of us has been working on it continuously since the beginning of July. As an administrator, you are really independent and not a mouthpiece of the entrepreneur. The most important thing is simply whether the business is viable, and in this case it is. It’s about doing the sums and then you engage with all the creditors.’

The Oubaha issue is special, agrees Herstel. ‘Many companies go bankrupt a few days after the moratorium anyway. Look at Blokker or Stella. Here, the process took many months, with a good outcome. Also unusual: other people had spent a year working on an initial rescue operation, through the so-called Whoa procedure. That failed. And now it’s been successful. That’s pretty special.’

This article by Harm Graat and Henk van Gelder previously appeared in The Gelderlander.