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Last month, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals clarified the circumstances under which a creditor can assert a “new value” defense to a preference action under section 547(c)(4) of the Bankruptcy Code—rejecting as dictum language in a prior decision indicating that the new value provided needed to remain unpaid in order to setoff against preference payments. The Eleventh Circuit’s decision also had the effect of narrowing a split among the circuits.

The Background

Good evening,

Below are this week’s summaries of the civil decisions of the Court of Appeal.

Topics this week included personal injury, family law, employment law, property law, mortgages, bankruptcy and insolvency and extensions of time to appeal.

Have a nice weekend.

Below are this week’s summaries of the civil decisions of the Court of Appeal.

Congratulations to our very own Bill Anderson for succeeding on our client’s appeal in Holmes v. Hatch Ltd., 2017 ONCA 880.

In this Employment law decision, the Court of Appeal allowed the appeal from the motion judge’s decision granting summary judgment against our client on the basis that the motion judge was not at liberty to find liability on a legal theory that was not pleaded by the plaintiff and which our client did not have an opportunity to properly address in the evidence.

On September 22, 2017, the First Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the district court, and overruled its own prior guidance, to hold that a committee of unsecured creditors had the right to be heard in adversary proceedings related to the restructuring of Puerto Rico’s debt. The Court’s decision in Assured Guar. Corp. v. Fin. Oversight & Mgmt. Bd. for P.R. (In re Fin. Oversight & Mgmt. Bd.

In its fifth trip to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, the Sentinel Management Group’s bankruptcy case recently explored complex issues bankruptcy practitioners often encounter in large chapter 11 cases with financial services debtors.

This Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected General Motors’ petition for a writ of certiorari, which GM filed in an attempt to overturn a ruling by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals related to the sale of substantially all of GM’s assets in bankruptcy. When we last visited the case in a prior blog post, GM’s petition to the Supreme Court was still pending.

In a prior blog post, we discussed the Second Circuit Court of Appeals’ reversal of the bankruptcy court in In re General Motors. In its opinion, the Second Circuit held that a sale of assets without proper notice to potential plaintiffs with defect claims violated the plaintiffs’ due process rights and resulted in a sale to “New GM” that was not, in fact, “free and clear” of those claims.

There were four substantive civil decision released this week. The first, Sturino v. Crown Capital Corporation is a priority dispute in the receivership context. The second, Iroquois Falls Power Corporation v. Ontario Electricity Financial Corporation involved a motion to stay a Superior Court order pending the determination of a leave application to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada (the stay was denied). The third, Silva v.