Corporate Chapter 11 filings remained relatively low in 2014, down slightly from 2013, due to a robust capital market environment, low interest rates and easy access to financing. These and other factors allowed highly leveraged borrowers that might otherwise have been Chapter 11 restructuring candidates to refinance or pursue other nonjudicial restructuring alternatives. Among those companies that filed corporate bankruptcies, the District of Delaware and the Southern District of New York continued to capture the lion's share of cases.
Dealing a major blow to the trustee’s efforts to recover fraudulent transfers on behalf of the bankruptcy estate of the company run by Bernard Madoff, Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York held in SIPC v. Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC1 that the Bankruptcy Code cannot be used to recover fraudulent transfers of funds that occur entirely outside the United States.