EOS Matrix Bosnia and Herzegovina Executive Director for Legal Affairs Mirza Kahvedzic discusses his career path leading up to his current role, how his legal team operates, and current challenges faced due to slow court proceedings.
CEELM: Tell us a bit about yourself and your career path leading up to your current role.
Kahvedzic: After completing my internship at Section II for Organised Crime, Economic Crime and Corruption of the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2017, I continued my professional career at EOS Matrix, where I work to this day. I can say that at EOS I had the opportunity to professionally advance step by step – progressing from a Legal Associate to Head of the Legal Department, to my current role of Executive Director for Legal Affairs.
After 2020, our company expanded its scope of interest, and we started acquiring portfolios of secured receivables and real estate, which resulted in creating another business line – and I stepped into the role of Head of Legal Secured Receivables Department. After some time, I was appointed Procurator of the company, and after that, I settled in the position of Executive Director for Legal Affairs. In the meantime, I passed the bar exam, as well as the attorney’s exam, completing my formal legal education.
At the same time, I hold the position of Procurator in Creditable Opportunities BA, a company founded as a joint venture by our owner – the Hamburg-based EOS Group and the International Finance Corporation, a member of the World Bank Group, which also specializes in the sale and purchase of non-performing loans and acquisition and sale of the real estate. This type of highly successful cooperation with the IFC in Bosnia and Herzegovina is something I am particularly proud of.
CEELM: What was the biggest difference when transitioning to the private sector and what were the biggest challenges for you?
Kahvedzic: Moving to the private sector, particularly at a company like EOS Matrix, which is part of the EOS Group with over 6,000 employees, offered extensive opportunities for personal and professional development. I’m referring to the opportunity to actively participate in the decision-making process and make a real impact on the business, our clients, and society in general.
The biggest challenges for me were certainly reflected in the efforts to justify the trust and responsibility given to me, in terms of making important decisions and taking responsibility for them as well as for organizing the successful functioning of various departments.
CEELM: How large is your in-house team currently and how is it structured?
Kahvedzic: EOS Matrix in Bosnia and Herzegovina has a total of 80 employees, and our leadership position in the market of debt collection, purchase, and sale of real estate, is largely due to the merits of our internal lawyers.
When I joined EOS Matrix, there were but three lawyers, and now there are 18. Seven are assigned to the Legal Secured Receivables department – which deals with corporate NPL claims secured by mortgages, and pledges and handles our real estate portfolio. Eight are part of the Legal Unsecured Receivables department – which deals with the collection of NPL portfolios – i.e., debts toward natural persons. Lastly, three are part of the Compliance and General Legal Affairs department, which also includes six colleagues from administrative affairs. As was already the case for all of these years, the expansion of our business activities is something that will naturally follow the further expansion of our in-house legal teams.
CEELM: How do you decide if you are outsourcing a project or using internal/in-house resources?
Kahvedzic: Looking at the structure of our cases – we have thousands of active court proceedings – our in-house lawyers handle most of those. We take a custom approach in relation to certain cases with greater exposure, and based on this we decide whether to outsource a certain case or group of cases to one of the more than ten law firms we cooperate with in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Criteria such as geographic location, specific know-how in relation to certain legal situations, and determining the work priorities of our internal team lawyers, all guide us when deciding on whether to externalize. For us, it is really important to establish cooperation with highly respected lawyers who are experts in the field of enforcement, litigation, and insolvency proceedings, and possess the specific knowledge needed to handle complicated transactions of acquisitions of new portfolios and ultimately to provide effective solutions for legal workout and court collection of receivables.
CEELM: What has been keeping you and your in-house team busy over the last 12 months? What about the upcoming 12 months? What are you keeping on your radar that you think will impact your workload the most?
Kahvedzic: A stable investment cycle which included the purchase of dozens of NPL portfolios owned by commercial banks seated in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as real estate portfolios intended for further sale on the market, is something that kept us quite busy in the previous year – last year we invested approximately EUR 35 million into the market. Observing the trends, this cycle will certainly continue in the current business year. Financially, the company is on a strong track with a positive earnings figure of more than EUR 5 million EBT.
However, every portfolio acquisition entitles our efforts to continue with great results in the collection of the claims and sale of real estate, and that is a challenge. Looking at the results so far, the quality of our employees, as well as the enormous support from our group, I am confident that we will achieve excellent results in the months and years that follow.
CEELM: What do you foresee to be the main challenges for GCs in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the near/mid future?
Kahvedzic: For a relatively small market like Bosnia and Herzegovina, there are certainly many challenges. One of those involves finding quality personnel and this is something we are actively working on as a company, not only in terms of recruiting and offering a benefits system for our employees but also in terms of our collective efforts to ensure that top talent stays in our company for the long haul.
Challenges are reflected in our efforts to overcome obstacles that we most often encounter in the court system – combating and arguing against uneven judicial practice courts and trying to use different work-out methods and legal instruments to speed up court proceedings and get them in line with the time tracks prescribed by the law. The slow pace of court proceedings can be frustrating – we actively engage with the system and use all legal remedies to overcome this issue (i.e., stronger “grip” on the court, reaching out to court presidents, appealing to the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina, etc.) in order to advocate for faster resolutions and ensure our cases are handled efficiently.
Finally, the challenges of modern times require constant monitoring of trends in the field of process digitization and development of IT, and this is for sure something we are constantly trying to follow and implement in our processes. To that end, we have a dedicated team constantly evaluating and integrating new solutions to improve our processes and efficiency.
This article was originally published in Issue 11.4 of the CEE Legal Matters Magazine. If you would like to receive a hard copy of the magazine, you can subscribe here.
