Over the last seven months there has been a spate of cases dealing with the relationship between arbitration law and insolvency law.

Winding-up petitions and arbitration clauses

In February this year, Squire colleagues Paul Muscutt and Helen Kavanagh wrote about the Carrington Wire Defined Benefit Pension Scheme, where  the UK Pensions Regulator accepted a payment of £8.5m to settle warning notices of £17.7m issued to Russian companies that had guaranteed sums due from Carrington Wire to the Scheme (“the Guarantee”).

Despite the fact that there have been no football club insolvencies in over two seasons, on 5 June 2015 the Football League voted to amend its rules on football insolvencies. The amendments to the existing rules were approved at the recent Football League Conference and will come into force from the start of the 2015-16 football season. They provide a range of changes to take a harder line on clubs (or their parent companies) that enter administration and to improve returns to creditors, both football and non-football related.

On 26 May 2015 new UK insolvency law changes take effect and all insolvency practitioners and stakeholders should be aware of these amended rules which apply from today onwards. Read on to make sure you are up to date!

It has been an interesting 12 months in the world of insolvency and restructuring.

In the United Kingdom, the Pension Protection Fund (“PPF”) is the safety net for the employee members of a defined benefit pension plan or scheme.  The PPF compensates members when an employer has not and cannot put sufficient assets in the pension scheme to meet its obligations to member employees and the employer has suffered a “qualifying insolvency event”.

A recent English High Court decision has held that prospective Administrators do not need to look behind the directors’ motives in appointing them; they need to look ahead as to what might happen in the administration and consider whether the statutory purpose of the administration can be achieved.

The UK’s Pension Protection Fund (PPF) is about to publish new guidelines to reflect their increased focus on the approval of Insolvency Practitioner’s (IPs) fees. The guidelines require IPs to provide more regular detail of accruing and anticipated costs to the PPF when they are appointed over employers where Defined Benefit (Final Salary) pension schemes are significant creditors. More specifically IPs will now be required to provide a more detailed explanation of how their proposed remuneration reflects the value provided to creditors.

Overview

This article considers the state of the care homes industry, certain issues that arise when dealing with the imminent insolvency of care homes and initial considerations about what to take into account when determining sales strategy.

General concerns

The fortunes of agricultural businesses across the world have always been vulnerable to natural and economic forces such as climate change, world commodity pricing and exchange rate movement. Nowhere is this more evident today than in the current crisis facing the UK dairy farming industry where the unique political and environmental conditions of 2014 have driven milk prices down to some of the lowest levels seen in recent years testing the viability of many of the country’s dairy farmers.