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Advocates Mathew Newman and Sam Dingle acted for the Joint Administrators of a Guernsey company (Company), which was a party to ongoing court proceedings in England.

The Joint Administrators applied to the Royal Court of Guernsey seeking an order that it issue a Letter of Request to the High Court of Justice of England and Wales, requesting the High Court to act in aid of and auxiliary to the Royal Court pursuant to section 426 of the Insolvency Act 1986 (1986 Act) in recognising the appointment of the Joint Administrators as administrators of the Company.

On October 27, 2014, the Delaware Supreme Court ruled that even inadvertent mistakes in UCC filings count, and the burden rests on the filing party to detect errors, and not on affected parties who come across them in a search. This ruling upsets a 2013 decision of a bankruptcy court and will ultimately determine the character of a $1.5 billion security interest in the General Motors (GM) bankruptcy.

Background

On Oct. 27, the Delaware Supreme Court ruled that even inadvertent mistakes in UCC filings count – the burden rests on the filing party to detect errors, and not on affected parties who come across them in a search. This ruling upsets the 2013 decision of the bankruptcy court and will ultimately determine the character of a $1.5 billion security interest in the General Motors (GM) bankruptcy.

Background

As bankruptcy practitioners will recall, the Supreme Court held in Stern v. Marshall, 564 U.S., 131 S.Ct. 2594, 2620 (2011) that bankruptcy courts, as non-Article III courts, “lack[] the constitutional authority to enter a final judgment on a state law counterclaim that is not resolved in the process of ruling on a creditor’s proof of claim,” even though Congress had classified these types of proceedings as core – and thus authorized federal bankruptcy courts to hear and decide them.