In the holiday season many of us jet-set to foreign shores – but do we ever think about how we might get home if our budget airline goes bust or are we just hunting for the best deals to make the pound stretch further?
The last decade has seen a number of airlines collapse or be swallowed up by competitors:
The Australian corporate insolvency regime is undergoing significant reform. A suite of new amendments have been implemented or proposed, and the new “ipso facto” amendments that have been implemented as part of the second wave of reforms will apply to most contracts entered into after July 1, 2018.
Following a suite of recent reforms to Australian insolvency laws, liquidators are now able to assign rights to sue, conferred on them personally by the Corporations Act. The new power to assign is broad. It appears that the implications of the power will need to be clarified by the judiciary before they are fully understood.
In this article, we look at the issues that arise from these legislative amendments along with the opportunities created.
The reforms introducing a safe harbour for directors of insolvent companies and, from 1 July 2018, a limited stay on the operation of ipso facto clauses have been passed by both Houses of the Australian Parliament and will likely be enacted by month end. Late on Monday evening, after some debate, the Senate passed the reforms with only minor amendments. The Treasury Laws Amendment (2017 Enterprise Incentives No. 2) Bill 2017 then returned to the House of Representatives who formally passed the amended Bill last night.
Safe harbour
The Senate Economics Legislation Committee has strongly recommended that the Australian Parliament pass the reforms to Australia's safe harbour and ipso facto regime currently before the Senate. As the reforms have already passed through the House of Representatives, this means that as early as the end of August 2017, in prescribed circumstances, directors could be entitled to a safe harbour from personal liability for insolvent trading claims.
Safe harbour
The use of pre-packs or pre-positioned asset sales in Australia has traditionally been limited. This is a result of impediments to such transactions under the Australian legislative insolvency regime.
The interplay of these impeding factors means that there are few true pre-pack transactions in Australia. However, significant reform to the Australian insolvency regime is expected to be implemented in 2017. We wrote about the main aspects of that reform in our last article, `Australian insolvency law reforms aim to increase business restructuring opportunities'
The Australian government is working to significantly reform Australia’s current insolvency laws by mid-2017.
The reforms are intended to achieve greater likelihood of business preservation by introducing the flexibility to achieve real turnaround of businesses in crisis.
The proposed changes include:
As the country recovers from the shock outcome of last Thursday’s Referendum, the question which Restructuring professionals must now consider is “what does Brexit mean for me?”. The truth is that nobody really knows. The Referendum decision is not legally binding on the UK Government and the process of the UK leaving the EU will only start once the UK has served formal notice on the EU pursuant to Article 50 of the Treaty on the European Union. This will start a two year negotiation period to effect Brexit.
On 23 June 2016 a 52% majority of the British people voted in favour of leaving the European Union. It seems likely that the immediate effect of the Brexit vote will be a degree of turmoil in the financial markets, involving, for instance a devaluation of Sterling against the Euro and of the Euro against the USD.
Chances are those well-known eloquent lyrics have stirred up some patriotic spirit from somewhere deep within even the most sporting averse of us.
With the 2016 summer of sport fast upon us the effect of the Euros, Wimbledon and the Olympics could have a significant impact on the economy (and the nerves) of the nation.