A February 16, 2021 decision of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York held, in In re Citibank August 11, 2020 Wire Transfers, 520 F. Supp. 3d 390, that lenders who received almost $900 million mistakenly wired to them by Citibank (the administrative agent for a $1.8-billion syndicated seven-year term loan to Revlon [2016 Loan]) were entitled to keep the money.

There is an inherent tension between the goals of bankruptcy law and the state law doctrine of constructive trust. A central tenet of bankruptcy policy is that similarly situated creditors should be treated equally: because an insolvent business or individual will not be able to pay all creditors in full, a proper bankruptcy system must provide as equitable a distribution to each of them as possible. Constructive trust law, on the other hand, works to the advantage of a single creditor – which always means the detriment of the others when everyone is competing for limited funds.