A comprehensive change to German insolvency and restructuring law has become effective starting 1 January 2021. The change allows that a company's reorganization is possible without insolvency and includes the majority decision of its creditors.

Having managed to undertake my first piece of business development last Friday by playing golf with a client and a couple of colleagues - all socially distanced of course - I then managed to avoid most of the news at the weekend.  

When Monday morning came and I logged on to my home desk I was therefore feeling rather chipper. Sadly the feeling didn't last long as I then read that:

Both the German federal government and various German federal states are pushing ahead with packages of measures to mitigate the as-yet-unforeseeable economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Overview

In order to mitigate the economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, the legislator passed the COVID-19 Insolvency Suspension Act (COVInsAG; the “Act”), which came into force on 27 March with retroactive effect from 1 March 2020.

The BEIS press release does not give much more by way of detail. However the notes to the release state:-

The Supreme Court handed down an important judgement last week in the case of BNY Corporate Trustee Services Limited v Eurosail - UK 2007 - 3BL PLC ("the Eurosail Case"), which needs to be considered by anyone who is a party to a contract which contains events of default relating to the insolvency of a party to that contract.

Background