On December 17 2010 the Cabinet approved the draft bill reforming the Insolvency Act, which will now take several months to pass through Parliament. The reforms will encourage banks to refinance debts and provide liquidity for businesses in difficulty so that they can avoid bankruptcy, thus reducing the workload of the commercial courts.

This update considers the validity of a transfer agreement under which one party instructs another to transfer funds to a third-party creditor of the instructing party, when the instructing party is declared bankrupt before completion of the transfer. Introduction A 'transfer agreement' is defined in the Civil Code(1) as follows: "Whoever transfers to another party (the transferee) a performance of a third party (the transmittee), he shall authorize thereby the transferee to accept that performance and the transmittee to effect it on the account of the transferor."

This update looks at recent decisions reached by the Constitutional Court and the insolvency court when deciding on a nullity plea in insolvency proceedings.

This year’s INSOL Europe conference set new standards, culminating in a truly extraordinary gala dinner at a spectacular Vienna palace, nowadays housing the Liechtenstein Museum, opera singing and Viennese waltzing. It is hard to imagine how any conference could top it; will next year’s venue in Venice manage it? No doubt Caroline Taylor’s team is already on the case.

The goal of the Debt Restructuring and Debt Protection Act (743 SE) is to afford debt restructuring for individuals in financial difficulties, to enable them to overcome the difficulties and prevent a bankruptcy procedure as stipulated in the Bankruptcy Act, providing that the creditors’ and debtor’s legitimate interests are observed in the restructuring proceeding.

Since the beginning of 2011, creditors of and investors in German banks have faced a radically changed restructuring regime, whose impact on investor recoveries in a crisis may be significant. While at first glance the new framework seems to introduce proceedings similar to a U.S.

In the Czech Republic, insolvency proceedings are open to misuse through objectionable and rather unethical anti-competitive means. An insolvency petition submitted at an opportune moment can have serious consequences for competitors.