Broadly, provisions 16 and 17 of the Code are aimed at protecting borrowers facing financial difficulties or in arrears, and require regulated lenders to have procedures in place to handle arrears cases, to give borrowers reasonable time to resolve an arrears problem and to try to agree an approach with the borrower to resolve the problem.
These operations have mainly taken place between institutions based in the same country: between 1985 and 2005, cross-border transactions accounted for less than 20% in terms of number and value of all M&A deals in the euro area and in the EU.