On 15 June 2015, the Abu Dhabi Global Market (Global Market), Abu Dhabi’s financial free zone, published the following six new regulations concerning the regulation of non-financial services in the Global Market:

The German Insolvency Code requires the management of German limited liability companies (GmbH), stock corporations (AG) and other entities without personal liability to file for the commencement of insolvency proceedings no later than three weeks after the entity has become illiquid (zahlungsunfähig) or overindebted (überschuldet).  

On August 28, 2012, the Special Tribunal related to Dubai World (the “Tribunal”) formally approved the restructuring of more than US$2 billion of debt of Drydocks World LLC and Drydocks World – Dubai LLC (together, “Drydocks”) under a syndicated term loan facility and separate hedging agreements, in the first restructuring approved under Dubai Decree No.

Following some delay, on June 6, 2012 the European Commission finally published its Proposal for a Directive of the European Parliament and the Council establishing a framework for the recovery and resolution of credit institutions and investment firms (so-called Crisis Management Directive¹ or CMD), which — once adopted — will apply to the 27 member states of the European Union (EU), but may also have relevance for those three contracting states of the Treaty on the European Economic Area (EEA), which are not member states of the EU.

English schemes of arrangement under the Companies Act 2006 (Schemes) have been increasingly used by non-English companies as a powerful tool to restructure their financial indebtedness. Recent prominent examples of German companies that have utilized Schemes to cramdown non-consenting or “holdout” creditors in order to restructure the company’s balance sheet include TeleColumbus, Rodenstock and Primacom.

There are several reasons for this trend: