Editor's Note: In this era of chapter 15, the EU Regulation on Insolvency Proceedings and Model Law, it is heartening to find that there is still life yet in the common law in cross-border cases. Bizarrely, given the levels of commerce between the United Kingdom and the United States, throughout the s.304 era there was no equivalent statutory means for cooperation and assistance to be requested and obtained in the United Kingdom in a bankruptcy case originating in the United States. One had the common law, and that was it.

When Sigurjón Árnason, former chief executive of Landsbanki, appeared before Iceland's independent "truth commission" last summer, he recalled the sense of confidence that pervaded the country's banking sector until 2008. It had "not occurred to anyone that there was a remote chance of a collapse like that which [would] later come to pass", he said, according to the long-awaited commission report into the Icelandic bank crash published April 12, the Financial Times reported.