On February 4, 2014, the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of New Jersey in In re Surma, 2014 WL 413572 (Bankr. D.N.J. Feb. 4, 2014), held that rents were not property of the debtor’s bankruptcy estate because they were subject to an absolute and unconditional assignment of rents in favor of the secured lender. As a result, the court concluded that the debtor may not, through his Chapter 11 plan of reorganization, use or allocate rents.

Background

In Virginia Broadband, LLC (Bankr. W.D. Va. Sept. 9, 2013), the unsecured creditors committee moved to dismiss an LLC’s chapter 11 bankruptcy case alleging a flaw in the authorization of the LLC’s bankruptcy filing caused by an authorizing member’s individual bankruptcy filing. Specifically, the committee alleged that when the authorizing member filed his individual bankruptcy case, Virginia law divested him of his non-economic (voting) rights in the LLC.

Yesterday, FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair, the keynote speaker at the Institute of International Bankers Cross-Border Insolvency Issues Conference in New York, stressed the need to end the “too big to fail” mentality by “eliminating the belief that the government will always support large, interconnected financial firms.” Chairman Bair noted that in order to do so, “we need an effective mechanism to close large, financial intermediaries when they get into trouble.”