In December 2018, at its 54th session in Vienna, Working Group V (Insolvency Law) of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) discussed revisions to its Enterprise Group Insolvency: Draft Model Law (the "EGI Model Law") as well as the EGI Model Law’s Guide to Enactment.

In the service of the Bankruptcy Code’s goals of giving debtors a "fresh start" and ensuring that estate assets are fairly and equally distributed among similarly situated creditors, the Bankruptcy Code contains an array of advantageous provisions that either do not exist under non-bankruptcy law or are more difficult to deploy. These include, among other things, the ability to reject burdensome contracts, to avoid preferential or fraudulent transfers, and to limit the amount of certain types of creditor claims.

In Schoenmann v. Bank of the West (In re Tenderloin Health), 849 F.3d 1231 (9th Cir. 2017), a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit recently addressed as a matter of apparent first impression whether or not a bankruptcy court can consider hypothetical preference actions in analyzing whether a creditor-transferee in preference litigation received more than it would have received in a hypothetical chapter 7 liquidation, as required by section 547(b)(5) of the Bankruptcy Code.

The ability to avoid fraudulent or preferential transfers is a fundamental part of U.S. bankruptcy law. However, when a transfer by a U.S. entity takes place outside the U.S. to a non-U.S. transferee—as is increasingly common in the global economy—courts disagree as to whether the Bankruptcy Code’s avoidance provisions can apply extraterritorially to avoid the transfer and recover the transferred assets. A ruling recently handed down by the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York widens a rift among the courts on this issue. In Spizz v. Goldfarb Seligman & Co.

In the November/December 2014 edition of the Business Restructuring Review, we discussed a decision handed down by the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware addressing the meaning of “unreasonably small capital” in the context of constructively fraudulent transfer avoidance litigation. In Whyte ex rel. SemGroup Litig. Trust v.

In December 2013, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held as a matter of first impression in Drawbridge Special Opportunities Fund LP v. Barnet (In re Barnet), 737 F.3d 238 (2d Cir. 2013), that section 109(a) of the Bankruptcy Code, which requires a debtor “under this title” to have a domicile, a place of business, or property in the U.S., applies in cases under chapter 15 of the Bankruptcy Code.

Whether a provision in a bond indenture or loan agreement obligating a borrower to pay a “make-whole” premium is enforceable in bankruptcy has been the subject of heated debate in recent years. A Delaware bankruptcy court recently weighed in on the issue in Del. Trust Co. v. Energy Future Intermediate Holding Co. LLC (In re Energy Future Holdings Corp.), 527 B.R. 178 (Bankr. D. Del. 2015).

Perhaps surprisingly given the rarity of such cases, a handful of high-profile court rulings recently have addressed whether a solvent chapter 11 debtor is obligated to pay postpetition, pre-effective date interest ("pendency interest") to unsecured creditors to render their claims "unimpaired" under a chapter 11 plan and, if so, at what rate.

A secured creditor's right to "credit bid" the amount of its allowed claim in a bankruptcy sale of its collateral is an important creditor protection codified in section 363(k) of the Bankruptcy Code. Even so, a ruling recently issued by the U.S.

Postpetition financing provided by pre-bankruptcy shareholders or other "insiders" is not uncommon in chapter 11 cases as a way to fund a plan of reorganization and allow old shareholders to retain an ownership interest in the reorganized entity. The practice is typically sanctioned by bankruptcy courts under an exception—the "new value" exception—to the "absolute priority rule," which prohibits shareholders and junior creditors from receiving any distribution under a plan on account of their interests or claims unless senior creditors are paid in full or agree otherwise.