The Personal Insolvency Bill has completed its passage through the Dáil and the Seanad (the Irish Houses of Parliament) and will now be passed to the President for signing into law.
The new legislation has been described by the Minister for Justice as “the most radical and comprehensive reform of our insolvency and bankruptcy law and practice since the foundation of the State.”
It provides for:
An application by Quinn family members to have court-appointed receivers removed and their solicitors discharged on the basis of an alleged conflict of interest and partiality has been dismissed by the Commercial Court.
The Personal Insolvency Bill has completed its passage through the Dáil (lower house of the Oireachtas (the Irish Parliament)). The Bill is now moving through the Seanad (upper house of the Oireachtas), where its provisions are subject to debate and amendment. The Minister for Justice recently confirmed his intention that the Bill will become law by Christmas.
The Bill provides for:
In a recent High Court case, a liquidator sought an order declaring that certain payments made by a company prior to its liquidation were a ‘fraudulent preference’ and invalid. The company had made payments to its overdrawn bank account which was personally guaranteed by one of its directors. It was alleged that the payments were made in order to reduce the company’s overdraft and therefore, the director’s own personal exposure under the guarantees.
The Government has announced that it will be delaying the proposed changes to Conditional Fee Arrangements ("CFA") and After the Event ("ATE") Insurance, in respect of insolvency proceedings, until 2015.
The term “pre-pack”, as it relates to insolvency sales, can have different meanings in different jurisdictions. In essence it refers to a sale of a distressed company or asset where the purchaser or investor has been identified and the terms of the sale have been fully negotiated before an insolvency process occurs. The advantage to the “pre-pack” structure is that the sale can be completed immediately upon or closely after the appointment of the insolvency office holder and, critically, without material interruption to the trading activity of the target company or asset.
The Central Bank of Ireland (the “Central Bank”) has declared its intention to strengthen the protection of client assets and has now published its “Review of the Regulatory Regime for the Safeguarding of Client Assets” (the “Review”).
The Review identifies three main objectives which should form the basis of a client asset protection regime:
In its recent decision in Lehman Brothers International (Europe) (in administration)1 the Supreme Court resolves the uncertainty where a regulated firm does not properly segregate client monies. The decision has a number of practical implications, not only for the administration of Lehman Brothers International (Europe) (LBIE) but also for the way client monies are held by institutions.
Background
Many employers dread triggering debts under section 75 of the Pensions Act 1995 within their defined benefit pension scheme, but in some circumstances it simply cannot be avoided. Once a section 75 debt has been triggered it is important that the debt is calculated properly. The Actuary is required to calculate the difference between the value of the scheme's assets and the cost of purchasing annuities to secure all of the liabilities of the scheme. But what if there is a delay in calculating the debt? At which date is the Actuary required to ascertain the cost of bu
The usage of pre-pack insolvency sales is less developed in Ireland than in other jurisdictions, but there has been an increasing number of asset sales structured through pre-pack receiverships over the last year. The most recent successful example was the sale of the A-Wear retail chain by its receiver Jim Luby of McStay Luby. In July 2011 the Superquinn grocery chain was sold to Musgraves by its receivers Kieran Wallace and Eamonn Richardson of KPMG, in what was probably the largest ever pre-pack transaction in this market.