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.

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.

On September 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy, an event considered by many to mark the beginning of the credit crisis of 2008–2009 and the unprecedented public policy responses that followed. Much has been written about the multiple contributing factors to the crisis, ranging from predatory lending to Federal Reserve interest rate policy.