As recently as February 2026, the company was out there signing deals. A new power purchase agreement with Hankook Tire. Existing contracts with Nestle, Cargill, Mars, and Auchan. A solar pipeline of over a gigawatt under construction in Poland. Nobody looking at it from the outside would have seen what was coming.Three months later it had €1.1 million in the bank and $952 million in debt. On May 29, 2026, GoldenPeaks Poland Holding and 39 affiliated entities walked into the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas and filed for Chapter 11, according to Bloomberg Law.What brought GoldenPeaks Poland to bankruptcy courtWhat brought the company down started with a subsidiary. Spectris Energy was a wholly owned affiliate that handled engineering, construction, and day-to-day operations across GoldenPeaks’ entire Polish solar portfolio.In January 2026, Spectris ran into trouble of its own. Rising component costs, higher interest rates, and currency swings pushed it into remedial proceedings in a Warsaw court. Polish tax authorities froze its bank accounts. Suppliers walked. Spectris went dark.GoldenPeaks had no employees of its own. Construction, operations, accounting, financing, land leasing, all of it ran through affiliated companies. When Spectris collapsed, GoldenPeaks had nobody left to run its solar farms.More Bankruptcy:28-year-old important high-tech firm files Chapter 11 bankruptcyPopular sporting goods store chain files Chapter 11 bankruptcyInternet provider files Chapter 7 bankruptcy, cuts off serviceIt scrambled to sign an emergency deal with a third-party Polish firm called Ergy to take over operations. That deal was signed 16 days before the bankruptcy filing.The grid made things worse. Poland’s transmission system operator had been restricting how much solar power could feed into the grid, a problem that had been cutting into GoldenPeaks’ revenue for months. The company was generating electricity that the grid couldn’t always absorb, which meant the cash flow the debt structure depended on kept coming up short.Then there was the refinancing that never happened. GoldenPeaks had been trying to raise equity or refinance its debt since at least mid-2025. It held informal sale discussions that summer, ran an RFP to banks, picked a preferred bidder, and still couldn’t close a deal.An equity raise in early 2026 attracted too little interest and was dropped. On May 19, it asked senior lenders for standstill agreements. Nobody signed. With a key standstill set to expire on May 31, the company filed Chapter 11 two days before that deadline.The financial governance problems court filings revealWhen restructuring firm Alvarez and Marsal came in to assess the situation, what they found wasn’t pretty. The company had been operating with multiple Chief Financial Officers with overlapping mandates. No standalone financial statements existed for any of the debtor entities. Financial controls were fragmented. There was no budget reporting, no construction cost supervision.Alvarez and Marsal described in court filings how GoldenPeaks units had unraveled “precipitously” and how liquidity had “evaporated” within weeks. In court papers, the company reported assets between $1 billion and $10 billion against liabilities of $500 million to $1 billion, according to IndexBox. Its funded debt alone came to $952 million, and it had less than €1.1 million in unencumbered cash when it filed.
What brought the company down started with a subsidiary.Mario/Getty Images
Brookfield’s role as lender and lead bidder in the GoldenPeaks saleBrookfield Asset Management was already GoldenPeaks’ controlling shareholder going into the bankruptcy. It was also the company’s most junior prepetition lender, with about $294 million outstanding.On June 3, 2026, Brookfield proposed a $162.8 million debtor-in-possession loan to keep the lights on during the restructuring, according to PV Tech.That put Brookfield in a position other creditors didn’t love. It was the controlling shareholder, the prepetition lender, the DIP lender, the DIP agent through its affiliate BID Administrator LLC, and it held two of five board seats.When the court also approved it as the stalking horse bidder on July 9, other creditors objected and said the whole setup was tilted in Brookfield’s favor. The judge didn’t agree.Brookfield already owns a stake in Polenergia, a Polish renewable energy company it bought into in 2021. A successful bid for GoldenPeaks would expand that Eastern European footprint. And because it can credit the debt it’s already owed toward its purchase price, it’s not writing fresh checks the way an outside bidder would have to.What happens next with GoldenPeaks’ 664 megawatt solar portfolioThe 664 megawatts of operational solar capacity is still running. The power purchase agreements with Nestle, Cargill, Mars, Mondelez, Auchan, and Hankook Tire are still in place. GoldenPeaks has a further 592 megawatts in construction or development.Bankruptcy doesn’t kill any of that. It just decides who gets to own it going forward.With Brookfield as the stalking horse, its bid sets the floor. Any competing buyer has to beat that number to take the assets away. Whether other investors show up and what they’re willing to pay is what the auction will answer.The Financial Post reported the court approved Brookfield’s role on July 9, over creditor objections.GoldenPeaks built something real in Poland. The problem was it built it on a structure that couldn’t survive losing the one company holding it all together. When Spectris went down, there wasn’t enough cash or time to replace it.Related: A big shift in the U.S. energy market is about to happen