Introduction

Today, the UK Supreme Court considered for the first time the existence, content and engagement of the so-called “creditor duty”: the alleged duty of a company’s directors to consider, or to act in accordance with, the interests of the company’s creditors when the company becomes insolvent, or when it approaches, or is at real risk of, insolvency.

The High Court in London gave judgment on Friday, 3 July 2020 on the relative ranking of over $10 billion of subordinated liabilities in the administrations of two entities in the Lehman Brothers group.

Private wealth structures are not immune from insolvency. Here we examine the Jersey and Guernsey position from the trustee's perspective and consider the issues with which a trustee needs to be familiar.

Test for insolvency

Background

So what precisely is an asset protection trust and what is it, over and above a normal trust that an asset protection trust is seeking to achieve? This paper considers these issues from a Jersey law perspective and fundamentally asks the question to what extent a Jersey trust, once established, will protect assets from creditor claims.

The recent decisions in Re MF Global UK Ltd and Re Omni Trustees Ltd give conflicting views as to whether section 236 of the Insolvency Act 1986 has extra-territorial effect. In this article, we look at the reasoning in the two judgments and discuss a possible further argument for extra-territorial effect.

The conflicting rulings on section 236