Pacific Gas and Electric Company and PG&E Corporation (together “PG&E”) filed for relief under Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Northern District of California on January 29, 2019.

Citing historically low electricity prices and a challenging business environment for power generators, Chicago-based Exelon Corp. filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy protections for Exelon Generation Texas Power LLC (“EGTP”) — a merchant generation unit Exelon owns in Texas.  The unit will continue to own and operate the 1,265 MW Handley Generating Station in Fort Worth, Texas, in exchange for a $60 million payment to the lenders.

In recent years, several foreign companies have used the English law scheme of arrangement as a flexible restructuring method to compromise creditor claims.  The decision of the High Court in the latest of these cases, that of the German company Rodenstock GmbH, clarifies that an English court will accept jurisdiction where the only connection to England is that the company’s finance documents were governed by English law.

One of the many issues which arose from the collapse of Lehman Brothers was whether “flip provisions”, which reverse a swap counterparty’s priority in the order of payment on insolvency, were invalid on the basis that they contravened the anti-deprivation principle.  This is a long-established common law principle which seeks to prevent an insolvent party from arranging its affairs to frustrate the legitimate claims of creditors.