The Court of Appeal decided yesterday that it couldn’t make a ruling on the correct way to calculate the collective redundancies threshold without making a reference to the European Court of Justice. Employers will therefore have to wait a considerable while longer before the law is clarified.

Not many people shed a tear for the players when a football club goes into administration. Instead the press always quote how much money the St John’s Ambulance Service loses. The realities are in any football insolvency the creditors (including the players) lose out and the players involved are usually at the lower level clubs. 

Not many people shed a tear for the players when a club goes into administration. But the realities are that the creditors lose out and that the players involved in the majority of cases are at the lower level clubs. Out of the 60+ club insolvencies we have been involved in, only one was in the Premier League.

Footballers’ salaries differ wildly. The PFA published a league table in The Mail on Sunday recently stating average weekly earnings for players were as follows:

The changes

Since 29 December 1986, the Insolvency Act 1986, as amended by 23 subsequent statutory instruments, has governed the way in which insolvency practitioners, lawyers, creditors, debtors and others dealing with insolvency issues, have addressed procedures such as bankruptcy, administration, liquidation and voluntary liquidation.

In Crystal Palace FC v Kavanagh the Court of Appeal has decided that liability for staff dismissed by the administrator before the sale of the club did not pass to the buyer under TUPE.

Several blogs ago, I asked whether a party could still argue that the Notified Sum (as defined in the Housing Grants Construction Regeneration Act 1996, as amended by the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Act 2009 - the Act) was not payable even in the absence of a Pay Less Notice.  To continue the theme of Pay Less Notices and their absence, what about the interplay between construction law and insolvency law - in the absence of a Pay Less Notice, and faced with a petition to the court to wind them up, could a party defend itself by saying that the so-called 'debt

With business liquidations and administrations down in Q1 of 2013, what will be the likely effect on claims against insolvency practitioners?

The numbers

The Insolvency Service recently reported that:

In an unusual move the High Court recently wound up a credit union on its own motion. Despite some procedural irregularities with the winding up petition, it was felt that the exceptional facts of this particular case justified the measure.

The case concerned a credit union registered under the Industrial and Provident Societies Act

The Technology and Construction Court has decided that judgment should not be stayed following a contractor's unsuccessful defence of an adjudication claim brought by its M&E subcontractor.

The case reaffirmed some key principles in assessing whether a stay is justified in adjudication enforcement proceedings:

The retention of a proportion of the contractor's fee is common practice in construction contracts. The parties sometimes agree (usually in unamended industry standard building contracts) that the retention amount is held on trust by the employer in a separate bank account. But what happens if there is no such express provision and the employer becomes insolvent?