Yesterday, the United States Supreme Court, in Merit Management Group, LP v. FTI Consulting, Inc., Case No. 16-784, ruled that the “securities safe harbor” under section 546(e) of the Bankruptcy Code, 11 U.S.C. §§ 101-1532, does not shield transferees from liability simply because a particular transaction was routed through a financial intermediary—so-called “conduit transactions.”

Introduction

The term ‘dispute’ assumes great importance under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, 2016 (Code). This is because under Section 9(5)(ii)(d) of the Code, an operational creditor’s application for initiating corporate insolvency is liable to be rejected if a ‘notice of dispute’ in relation to ‘existence of a dispute’ is received by such an operational creditor from a corporate debtor. The term ‘dispute’ is defined in Section 5(6) and referred to in Section 8(2) of the Code in the following manner: