Återvinningsutlåtande: fixed-price assessment, what you get and when, is answered directly here. The product is a single-transaction written opinion on whether a payment, asset transfer, or security granted before a Swedish counterparty's bankruptcy is exposed to a claw-back claim by the estate. Scope, exclusions, and delivery are fixed before work starts, and the fee does not move once the transaction is defined.
Who this concerns
This assessment is built for parties on either side of a transaction that happened shortly before a Swedish company entered konkurs: the recipient of a payment, a released security, or a transferred asset, and the trustee or creditor weighing whether that transaction is worth challenging. It also serves directors and shareholders who signed off on the transaction and want an independent read on their exposure before the trustee's own review reaches them.
Most instructions come through Lodline's debt recovery and enforcement practice, because a återvinningsutlåtande is usually the second question a foreign creditor asks, right after the first one: can the money be recovered from the estate at all, or does it sit with someone who received it first. If the receiving party is outside Sweden and the underlying contract carries an arbitration under SCC rules clause, that clause does not disappear because a bankruptcy has intervened; it shapes where any dispute about the return of the asset is actually heard.
What the law says
Swedish insolvency law lets the bankruptcy estate challenge certain transactions that happened before the konkurs was declared, on the basis that they moved value away from the pool available to all creditors and towards one party in particular. Whether a specific transaction is exposed turns on three things: how close in time it sits to the bankruptcy petition, whether the parties were connected to each other rather than dealing at arm's length, and what each side knew, or should have known, about the debtor's financial position at the time.
None of this is assessed against a table of fixed periods or automatic thresholds that we can quote out of context. Under Swedish law as it currently stands, each transaction is read on its own facts: the paper trail, the timing, and the relationship between the parties. That is precisely what a återvinningsutlåtande is built to do, and it is also why the opinion is written after the documents are in hand, not before.
How it works in practice
What counts as one transaction
The fixed price covers one transaction: one payment, one security interest, or one transfer, assessed on its own facts. A single wire transfer made in settlement of an invoice is one transaction. A running account where the same counterparty received several payments over several months is not one transaction, and is scoped, and priced, as a linked series once the pattern is visible in the bank statements.
What the assessment covers
The opinion sets out whether the transaction, on the facts supplied, falls within the categories that Swedish avoidance rules can reach, what the strongest argument for reversal would be, what the strongest defence against reversal would be, and how exposed the recipient or the estate actually is once both sides of that argument are weighed against each other.
What is excluded from scope
The assessment does not include representation in front of the trustee or the court, correspondence with the other side, or a review of transactions beyond the one specified at the outset. It does not extend to a full asset trace across multiple counterparties. Those are separate instructions, scoped and priced once the first opinion shows whether they are worth commissioning.
Documents we need before starting
The opinion is written from what is actually in the file: the underlying contract or invoice, the bank records showing the transfer or the security being granted, correspondence around the date of the transaction if it exists, and the bankruptcy decision itself with its date. An incomplete file does not stop the work; it changes the opinion into a conditional one, flagged as such rather than presented as a firm conclusion.
Who typically commissions this
Foreign creditors who received a payment and want to know their exposure before the trustee's letter arrives; Swedish and foreign counterparties deciding whether to fight a demand for return; directors weighing personal exposure separately from the company's. Trustees themselves rarely need this specific product; their own review runs on different rules of engagement, covered elsewhere in the debt recovery and enforcement practice.
How the fixed price is set
The price is fixed once the transaction, the documents available, and the number of parties involved are known, and it does not move once that scope is agreed. A single payment with a complete paper trail sits at one end of the range; a security interest granted to a connected party with a thin or disputed file sits at the other.
Delivery format and what you receive
The deliverable is a written opinion addressed to the instructing party, structured around the same three questions a trustee or a court would ask: timing, connection between the parties, and knowledge. It states a conclusion on exposure, not a guess dressed up as certainty, and where the file leaves a real question open, the opinion says so rather than rounding it away.
What to check before ordering
- The exact date the bankruptcy was declared, not the date the company stopped paying
- Whether the transaction was a single event or part of a recurring pattern with the same counterparty
- Whether the recipient had any prior relationship with the debtor beyond this one transaction
- Whether any part of the payment was returned or reversed before the bankruptcy
- Whether the underlying contract sits in a jurisdiction other than Sweden, which changes what happens after the opinion, not what the opinion itself covers
What does konkurs mean for this assessment?
Konkurs is the Swedish bankruptcy procedure that puts a company's remaining assets under a trustee's control for the benefit of all creditors together. The definition of konkurs matters here because the date it is declared is the fixed point every avoidance question is measured against; get that date wrong and the rest of the analysis moves with it.
Does the assessment cover nominee arrangements where the counterparty is foreign?
Yes, where relevant. If the party that received the payment or the security is a nominee holding on behalf of someone else, the opinion has to look past the nominee to the party actually benefiting, because that is who the avoidance rules and any later recovery step care about. The mechanics of that look-through are covered separately in nominee arrangements and beneficial ownership when the counterparty sits abroad.
If the opinion supports a claim, can a resulting judgment be enforced abroad?
That depends on where the party holding the asset is based. A Swedish judgment does not enforce itself outside Sweden, and the route differs by country. Where the counterparty sits in Switzerland, for instance, the relevant mechanics are set out in recognising a Swedish judgment in Switzerland; other jurisdictions run on different treaties and different timelines.
The numbers
There is no published price list for a återvinningsutlåtande, and no fixed number of working days that applies regardless of the file. What drives both is the same thing: how complete the documentation is when the instruction starts, and how many parties or transactions the facts actually involve once the bank statements are read in full.
A single transaction with a full paper trail, a clear bankruptcy date, and no dispute about who received what is priced and delivered fastest. A transaction that turns out to be one of several, or that involves a counterparty whose relationship to the debtor is itself contested, is scoped as that larger question once it surfaces, not squeezed into the original brief. Turnaround, in other words, is a function of how much of the file arrives complete on day one, not of the calendar.
Where it usually goes wrong
The assessment stops being the right product once the question is no longer "is this transaction exposed" but "how do we get the asset back", or "how do we defend a claim that has already been filed". At that point the work is representation, not an opinion, and it runs on a different instruction with its own scope.
It also stops fitting cleanly where the transaction cannot be isolated: a running account with the same counterparty over an extended period, a chain of related entities each holding a piece of the same asset, or a security interest that was itself restructured more than once before the bankruptcy. Those files need a wider mandate before a useful opinion can be written, and pretending otherwise produces a conclusion that reads clean but does not hold up once the trustee looks at the same facts from the other side.
Finally, where the recipient is a foreign entity and the law governing the underlying contract is not Swedish law, the opinion can still assess the Swedish avoidance question, but it cannot, on its own, tell you what a foreign court will do with the same facts. That is a separate question, scoped separately.
What to do next
This page gets you to the point where you know what the product is, what it covers, and what it leaves out. The part it cannot do from here is read your specific bank statements, contract, and bankruptcy decision, because that reading is the assessment itself.
The next step is to send the four documents listed above through to Lodline directly and confirm in return whether the facts describe one transaction or several; that answer sets the scope and the fixed price before any work starts. For the wider mechanics of pursuing or defending a claim once the opinion is in hand, the step-by-step guide on security costs from a foreign claimant covers what happens next once a case is actually filed.