Overview

If you walk along the seafront in the Lancashire town of Morecambe, you will come across a statue of the late Eric Morecambe. Many of us will remember Eric as half of one of the most famous comic double acts in the United Kingdom. Morecambe and Wise made us laugh, not so much through innuendo but more through the perfect timing of their various on screen exchanges. So important was timing to Eric Morecambe that one of the quotes at the foot of his statue is the phrase "In life, everything is timing".

Overview

Background

The defining feature of the restructuring plan, which was introduced by the Corporate Insolvency and Governance Act 2020, is the "cross class cram down" ("CCCD") mechanism it introduces as a means of imposing a settlement on recalcitrant creditors.

Overview

Judgment was handed down on 30 September sanctioning the much-trailed restructuring plans for the Cineworld UK group of companies. The sanctioning of the Plans was widely expected, but drama came at the eleventh hour as a result of two last minute challenges brought by UK Commercial Property Finance Holdings ("UKCP") and the Crown Estate (both landlords of Cineworld leases). UKCP and the Crown Estate sought injunctions - not to challenge the Plans in themselves - but to order the removal of their leases from the Plans. 

The German Federal Court of Justice (the Federal Court) has considered whether a so-called "weak" preliminary insolvency administrator, entrusted to continue business operations with the management during the preliminary proceeding, may take actions in the interest of these operations, where it is unclear whether the debtor has discontinued the business.

Background

According to the German Federal Court of Justice (the Court), a “related party” (nahestehende Person) within the meaning of German insolvency law includes in the case of a legal entity, an indirect shareholder, provided that it holds more than 25% of the shares. Here, the Court will assume that the legal entity has advance knowledge of the financial situation of its subsidiary.

Background

On 9 February, the High Court handed down its judgement on Re Link Fund Solutions Ltd [2024] EWHC 250 (Ch) (the "Link Case").

In a recent case before the Federal Court of Justice, an insolvency administrator was found to have neglected his duties of investigation in a particularly serious and reproachable manner.

Decision

The insolvency administrator had contested the offsetting of an investment subsidy by the creditor bank to balance the debtor’s accounts.

The focus of the decision was whether the insolvency administrator had made the contestation claim within the statutory limitation period. In Germany, this is usually three years and starts:

The High Court has reaffirmed the test to be applied in considering an application to dismiss a bankruptcy summons grounded on a judgment.

The bankruptcy process in Ireland involves multiple steps and the debtor can seek to bring it to a halt at each step. Debtors often seek to rerun effectively the same arguments at each step, ignoring previous findings by the courts. One such step is an application to dismiss a bankruptcy summons.

It is a cornerstone of English insolvency law and practice that creditors of a company in financial difficulty should share rateably (“pari passu”) in that company's assets. Put at its simplest, creditors with security should be paid before creditors with no security and unsecured creditors should share rateably between each other. Where an unconnected and unsecured creditor is paid before another creditor in the same category, that payment risks being set aside as a "preference", should the company subsequently enter liquidation or administration. But when does a preference occur?