In a challenging economic climate, we usually see an increase in leases ending prematurely, either by agreement or by landlords irritating (forfeiting) the lease when they are faced with an insolvent tenant or bad payers. Tenants in these circumstances will often leave behind goods and equipment. The temptation for landlords is just to throw the stuff away so they can re-let but there are restrictions on what a landlord can and can't do with abandoned goods in Scotland.

What should you do if a tenant leaves goods behind at the premises (tenant not insolvent)?

The UK Government has announced that the temporary measures which were put in place to protect businesses from insolvency during the pandemic are to be lifted and from 1 October 2021. This means that creditors will be able to seek to wind up debtors who owe them money. But, the devil is in the detail. Creditors do not have carte blanche and new conditions apply. In order to continue to promote business rescue, these conditions will remain in place from 1 October 2021 to 31 March 2022.

In bankruptcy as in federal jurisprudence generally, to characterize something with the near-epithet of “federal common law” virtually dooms it to rejection.

In January 2020 we reported that, after the reconsideration suggested by two Supreme Court justices and revisions to account for the Supreme Court’s Merit Management decision,[1] the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit stood by its origina

It seems to be a common misunderstanding, even among lawyers who are not bankruptcy lawyers, that litigation in federal bankruptcy court consists largely or even exclusively of disputes about the avoidance of transactions as preferential or fraudulent, the allowance of claims and the confirmation of plans of reorganization. However, with a jurisdictional reach that encompasses “all civil proceedings . . .

I don’t know if Congress foresaw, when it enacted new Subchapter V of Chapter 11 of the Code[1] in the Small Business Reorganization Act of 2019 (“SBRA”), that debtors in pending cases would seek to convert or redesignate their cases as Subchapter V cases when SBRA became effective on February 19, 2020, but it was foreseeable.

Our February 26 post [1] reported on the first case dealing with the question whether a debtor in a pending Chapter 11 case may redesignate it as a case under Subchapter V, [2] the new subchapter of Chapter 11 adopted by the Small Business Reorganization Act of 2019 (“SBRA”), which became effective on February 19.

Our February 26 post entitled “SBRA Springs to Life”^[1] reported on the first case known to me that dealt with the issue whether a debtor in a pending Chapter 11 case should be permitted to amend its petition to designate it as a case under Subchapter V,^[2] the new subchapter of Chapter 11 adopted by

State governments can be creditors of individuals, businesses and institutions that are debtors in bankruptcy in a variety of ways, most notably as tax and fine collectors but also as lenders. They can also be debtors of debtors, in their role, for example, as the purchasers of vast quantities of goods and services on credit. And they can also be transferees of a debtor’s property in (at least) every role in which they can be creditors.

We have noodled on the impact that the Supreme Court’s decision in Merit Management Group, LP v.