The court in Lleida has applied the Second Chance Law to a good-faith debtor trapped by costs arising from an expansion at a broiler chicken farm.
Lleida, 4 Nov. 2025. Commercial Court No. 1 of Lleida has ruled to write off a debt totalling 1,212,910 euros owed by a woman who had signed as guarantor on loans taken out by her husband. The judge applied the Second Chance Law, discharging the woman from the unsatisfied liabilities.
The debt originated in an attempt to keep afloat a company managing broiler chicken farms. The affected woman’s husband established this company in 2014, and by 2016 an expansion had been carried out with the construction of a second poultry house. To finance both investments, the couple took out mortgages.
According to the account the woman gave through her solicitor, Marta Bergadà, although at first the husband’s brothers had distanced themselves, in 2020 they “claimed their share of the assets”. This claim triggered a “full-scale battle over family disagreements that ended up in court”.
Several difficult years for the poultry sector coincided with family disputes
As a consequence of the family litigation, which generated substantial legal and solicitors’ fees, the husband began taking out loans to keep both broiler farms afloat and cover the costs of the legal dispute. The woman signed as guarantor, expressing that she stood by him and gave him her full support. Enduring several years in which the broiler farms yielded very low returns or simply ran at a loss, combined with the family shareholder conflict, caused the situation to deteriorate rapidly: “The snowball kept getting bigger and bigger until it ran us over“, the affected woman recounted, with the debt surpassing one million euros.
While the legal proceedings advanced, the woman had to endure “constant harassment and threats from debt collection companies and banking institutions”, describing how “there were many calls, and there was pressure and threats that were inevitably taking their toll”.
The Second Chance Law and “good faith”
The solution came at the end of last year when, following a change of legal counsel, the couple was advised to avail themselves of the Second Chance Law, and they contacted the firm Bergadà Abogados. After analysing the documentation provided, the firm considered that the woman met the requirements set out by this law and that she was a “good-faith debtor”.
The Second Chance Law was created for those individuals who, “without being directly responsible for a debt, find themselves trapped in an unsustainable financial situation”. The client had acted as guarantor out of her personal and emotional commitment to her husband, but that burden suffocated her financially. The discharge of the unsatisfied liabilities was received with “an enormous sense of relief” by the woman, who concluded that now, thinking about her children’s future, life looks “different, far more peaceful”.
This case reminds us of the importance of doing the numbers very carefully before setting up a poultry farm, of seeking advice on the best legal structure for running a poultry business, and of avoiding joint-and-several guarantees wherever possible.
The solicitor stressed the grave responsibility involved in signing as a guarantor, an action that many people carry out without understanding the consequences. “Being a guarantor —she insists— means being liable with all your present and future assets if the borrower fails to pay”.
The lawyer warned that signing a guarantee is not a “simple formality or an innocent favour”, but rather an “enormous legal responsibility that can turn you into a lifelong debtor for a debt you did not even incur yourself”. The lack of clear information about this commitment remains, she says, “a very serious problem”.