Part 1 – Celsius Bankruptcy
In the latest High Court decision relating to Company Voluntary Arrangements in the UK, the judge held that the Regis hairdressing group CVA should be revoked on the basis that it favoured shareholders at the expense of landlord creditors
The novel coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic has the potential to impact the U.S. economy at a level which could ultimately rival or surpass the global financial crisis of 2009. Reports from commercial landlords suggest that a majority of retail and restaurant tenants, perhaps as many as 75%, failed to make payments of rent due on April 1st.
Today (19 September), following an expedited trial, the High Court rejected the application brought by affected landlords to challenge the CVA entered into by Debenhams Retail Limited.
The landlord applicants sought to challenge the CVA which closed stores and imposed rent reductions on landlords according to different categories. 'Category 5' landlords took the biggest hit with rents halved and early termination dates imposed. The CVA proposal was approved by Debenhams' creditors on 9 May 2019.
Five grounds were advanced by the landlords during the hearing:
Courts are often faced with the situation in which affiliated debtors file for Chapter 11 reorganization and request to have their cases jointly administered. While joint administration does not, without more, cause substantive consolidation of the assets and liabilities of the corporate group, jointly-administered debtors may propose a single plan of reorganization that establishes the recovery for all of the debtors’ creditors.
The last two months have seen two key appeals in which the court was required to decide whether the tenant of a particular type of building should enjoy the statutory right to acquire the freehold of a house. This right is enshrined in the Leasehold Reform Act 1967.
The properties, and the questions for the court in each case, were quite different. What the judgments had in common was a purposive approach to interpretation of the Act.
BACKGROUND
It has been understood since the Hindcastle case in 1997 that a guarantor’s payment obligations under a lease survive disclaimer by an insolvent tenant’s liquidator. What has been less clear is how that works, given that the tenant’s obligation to pay rent dies when the lease is disclaimed.
The High Court of England and Wales handed down judgment last week in the case of Christine Mary Laverty and others as Joint Liquidators of PGL Realisations PLC and others v British Gas Trading Limited [2014] EWHC 2721. In an important decision for the insolvency industry, it was held that the statutory deemed contracts regime for gas and electricity supply could not be used by utilities companies to gain priority over other creditors.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (the “Second Circuit”) recently followed the emerging trend of affording the safe harbor protections of section 546(e) of the Bankruptcy Code (the “Code”) to intermediary financial institutions acting as only conduits in otherwise voidable transactions.