In a written statement this morning from Lord Faulks QC, Minister of State for Civil Justice, the government has announced that, from April 2016, insolvency litigation will no longer be exempt from what have been abbreviated to “the LASPO reforms”.

Regular readers of my blogs over the years will know that I never pass up a chance to use a musical analogy for business problems. As an insolvency lawyer with a second calling treading the boards, my legal practice and my music frequently vie for my attention: never more so than during the Christmas season.

When is a foreign entity eligible to file a chapter 15 petition?  This question has been the subject of debate over the last few years, and Judge Martin Glenn’s recent opinion in In re Berau Capital Resources Pte Ltd. will add to this debate.  Although the debtor in the case was foreign and did not have a place of business in the United States, Judge Glenn concluded that the debtor had satisfied the eligibility provisions under section 109(a) of the Bankruptcy Code because the New York choice of law and forum selection clause in the underlying bond indenture rendered the

I am often asked “what do you do”? If I reply “a regulatory solicitor”, this inevitably elicits a blank expression from the enquirer (be that a non-lawyer or lawyer), so I go on to the more long-winded version, that I am a criminal solicitor who advises business owners and other stakeholders on how to stay on the right side of the criminal law, and defends them when they get it wrong.

On November 5, the DOJ announced a proposed settlement with a bank for allegedly violating bankruptcy rules by not providing homeowners with required notices that would have allowed them to challenge the accuracy of increased mortgage rates.

Personal data is a valuable corporate asset.  At times, the personal information collected from customers (such as email address, mailing address, phone number, etc.) can be a company’s most valuable asset.  Unfortunately, when a company attempts to sell this asset, it can find the value of the data significantly diminished due to promises made in a privacy policy the company implemented years before it ever contemplated such a sale.

The European Court of Justice (the "ECJ") has ruled that, in certain circumstances, when a subsidiary company is wound up, its employees will transfer automatically to its holding company.

What happened?

Air Atlantic SA ("AIA") was a Portuguese company operating in the aviation sector. It had been providing charter (or non-schedule) flight services since 1985.

On 19 February 1993, AIA was wound up. During the winding-up, several of AIA's employees were dismissed as part of a collective redundancy.

It was far from a secret that a veritable smorgasbord of phased changes to insolvency law were coming in on 1 October. The legal and insolvency press has been riddled with it, and frankly the flavours were all a bit predictable. The commentators falling over themselves to ask mundane questions such as “are you ready for…?” and “what will happen now…?” are really just asking “we are really up to date on the new law, aren’t we brilliant?”; of course you are, but you’re not getting any marks for originality.

It seems only fitting that recent decisions by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York and its bankruptcy court regarding the nature of electricity should have sent, at least initially, a jolt through the energy community.  Perhaps the Southern District court would lead the charge for one side or the other in an ongoing debate over whether electricity constitutes goods or services—a controversy that has potentially far-reaching implications (in bankruptcy cases, concerning the priority of claims of electricity providers, and, in ordinary transactions, for

The news in January of this year that the government planned to increase the bankruptcy petition threshold to £5,000 (subject to parliamentary scrutiny) from 1 October was greeted with mixed reaction. On the one hand, it was welcomed in that the threshold of £750 which had been in place since 1986 was wildly out of date.