Has COVID-19 encouraged you to reconsider your outsourcing needs? If so, it might be time to quarantine your outsourcing agreements and give them a health check. Below we have tracked-and-traced a list of considerations to help you to isolate any potential areas in those agreements that may need sanitising.

Practical Effects Of Significant Reforms To Guernsey’s Insolvency Law With reference to practical examples from England & Wales, this briefing note seeks to highlight three areas of change that will be of particular interest to Insolvency Practitioners, directors involved with Guernsey companies and their professional advisors once the Companies (Guernsey) Law, 2008 (Insolvency) (Amendment) Ordinance, 2020 (the “Ordinance”) comes into force. Enhanced Investigatory Powers The Ordinance extends insolvency professionals’ powers in four important respects.

High Street Rooftop Holdings Limited (the Company) was part of a group of companies known as the High Street Group, which carried on real estate activities such as the development of residential apartments and construction, and the ownership of hotels, bars and restaurants.

On 13 June 2018, the Company entered into a secured term loan facility agreement with Strategic Advantage SPC as lender (the Lender) (the Facility Agreement). Under the Facility Agreement, the Applicant made funding of approximately £100 million available to the Company in tranches.

Significant changes will come into force after 31 December if no agreement is reached (or is not finalised and ratified) before the end of the transition period for cross-border insolvency proceedings. Importantly, the changes will alter the grounds for jurisdiction to open insolvency proceedings in the UK and impact the recognition of those UK insolvency proceedings in the EU.

On 9 December 2020, the UK government gave businesses muchneeded breathing space with an extension of insolvency measures. 

Alongside the permanent reforms to English insolvency law introduced by the Corporate Insolvency and Governance Act 2020, the government introduced a temporary suspension of certain provisions of the Insolvency Act 1986 (the IA) to address the economic turbulence caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Now that HMRC has become a preferential creditor for certain debts, other creditors – such as suppliers – could lose out.

Under the Finance Act 2020, from 1 December 2020, HMRC became a preferential creditor in insolvency proceedings. This may have significant impact on what’s left for other creditors.

In Short

The Situation: With effect from 1 December 2020, Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs ("HMRC") ranks ahead of floating charge holders and unsecured creditors with respect to recovering certain pre-insolvency taxes from an insolvent business (Crown preference). Directors can also now incur personal liability for the unpaid taxes of an insolvent company where they are involved in tax avoidance, evasion or phoenixism.

Earlier this year the UK Government introduced a number of temporary measures intended to avoid large scale insolvencies across the country. One of these measures was the suspension of wrongful trading liability.

This suspension was in place until September 30, 2020. Most of the other temporary measures were extended (e.g. the effective suspension of winding up petitions by creditors has been extended until December 31, 2020) but the suspension of wrongful trading liability was not extended.

The Ontario Superior Court of Justice (Canadian Court) recently recognized, for the first time, an English company voluntary arrangement (CVA) proceeding commenced pursuant to the UK Insolvency Act 1986 (Insolvency Act).