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On 23 March 2020, the Australian Parliament passed the Coronavirus Economic Response Package Omnibus Act No. 22 of 2020 (the Act), which is designed to provide an economic response to the effect, on Australia, of the coronavirus pandemic sweeping the world by stimulating and supporting economic activity.

In relation to the Australian insolvency regime the Act made some significant changes to the relevant laws as follows.

Temporary relief for financially distressed individuals and businesses

The Australian Financial Review recently published an article regarding requests to the Australian Government to impose a moratorium on the insolvent trading laws to "help businesses during the economic downturn".

On January 17, 2017, in a long-awaited decision in Marblegate Asset Management, LLC v. Education Management Finance Corp.,1 the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that Section 316 of the Trust Indenture Act ("TIA") does not prohibit an out of court restructuring of corporate bonds so long as an indenture's core payment terms are left intact.

The US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit has ruled that a lender’s security interest in accounts was not perfected because a reference to “proceeds” in the lender’s UCC financing statement did not expressly refer to “accounts.” The Sixth Circuit surprisingly interpreted the definition of “proceeds”1 in Article 9 of the Uniform Commercial Code to exclude “accounts”2 (despite and without reference to provisions of UCC Article 9 to the contrary).