Following an August 4, 2022 memorandum opinion from Judge Brendan L. Shannon of the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware, a party to a safe harbored contract can qualify as a “financial participant” under section 546(e) of the Bankruptcy Code even where the party was not a financial participant at the time of the transaction.

On January 15th, 2019, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of Ohio held that the end user of an electricity forward contact was not entitled to the benefits of the safe harbor provisions under Section 556 of the Bankruptcy Code. Section 556 allows a “forward contract merchant” to terminate a forward contract post-petition based on an ipso facto clause in the contract and exempts such actions from the automatic stay.

Yesterday (September 12, 2012) the Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas provided an excellent lesson on the need to know what sauce is going into the stew that governs privileged communications in bankruptcy proceedings.[1]

As NASA engineers breathe a sigh of relief after the “seven minutes of terror” that was the rover Curiosity’s landing on Mars, recipients of payments under commodity forward contracts can—at least in the Fifth Circuit—rest assured that agreements that meet the basic definition of forward contract contained in section 101(25) of the Bankruptcy Code will be protected from preference liability should their counterparties find themselves in bankruptcy. Last Thursday, in Lightfoot v. MXEnegry Electric, Inc. (In re MBS Management Servs., Inc.). No. 11-30553 (5th Cir. Aug.