The Court of Appeal has allowed an appeal against a limitation order (providing for the restoration to the register of a dissolved company, C, and the suspension of the limitation period during dissolution) and provided guidance on how judicial discretion should be exercised when making such an order.
Shortly before being placed into administration C entered into a sale and leaseback arrangement. C later went into liquidation; however, the purchase price in respect of the sale was not received before the company was dissolved, over four years later.
Tough trading conditions
Litigation
A referral to the financial list!
In GSO Credit v Barclays Bank plc, the Commercial Court has given guidance on the interpretation of terms in, but not directly defined by, standard Loan Market Association (LMA) documentation which was used in the context of secondary trading of a commitment under a surety bonds facility.
Where a company brings a claim against its directors for losses caused by their wrongdoing, the Supreme Court has confirmed the established position that directors cannot escape the claim by arguing that their actions are attributed to the company itself on the basis that the directors were acting as the agents of the company.
In 2011, the Supreme Court decided Stern v. Marshall, 564 U.S. ___, 131 S. Ct. 2594 (2011), which gave voice to the Court’s grave concerns about the constitutional limits of bankruptcy court jurisdiction and raised several questions that have confounded courts and lawyers for three years. Last week, the Supreme Court issued its first follow-up ruling, answering some of those questions and clarifying how bankruptcy courts are to handle so-called Stern claims. Despite that guidance, the opinion leaves several important questions unanswered.
As expected (and predicted), the bankruptcy judge in Dallas, Texas granted Mt. Gox’s request for an order of “recognition” that the debtor’s Tokyo insolvency action was a “foreign main proceeding.” She will also allow Mt. Gox’s bankruptcy trustee, Nobuaki Kobayahsi, to act as the “foreign representative” of the debtor in connection with whatever relief it might seek in the Chapter 15 case.
On June 18, 2014, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Dallas will consider whether to grant recognition to the insolvency case pending in Tokyo. Based on the pleadings filed last week, it is a virtual certainty that the court will enter an order granting recognition.
On May 21, the bankruptcy trustee for Mt. Gox advised depositors that the bankruptcy case in Tokyo was proceeding. The information contained in the email was limited in scope, guarded and of little use in understanding the trustee’s view of how the bankruptcy ultimately may resolve.
On April 28, in the wake of Mt. Gox’s Japanese rehabilitation proceeding having been converted to a liquidation proceeding, a proposal for selling and restarting the Mt. Gox exchange was submitted in the pending class action litigation in Illinois. The proposal was accepted by plaintiffs in the class action litigation before a class had even been certified.
The District Court for the Southern District of New York in Lehman Brothers recently threw cold water on a growing body of cases that permit compensation of professional fees incurred by individual members of official committees of unsecured creditors.