On January 4, 2023, Judge Glenn of the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York issued a much-awaited decision in the Celsius Network LLC (along with its affiliated debtors, “Celsius” or the “Debtors”) chapter 11 cases relating to the ownership of crypto assets deposited by customers in the Celsius “Earn” rewards program accounts.

2022 has been a bad year for the Carolina Panthers of the National Football League:

“The [Subchapter V] Trustee shall— . . . facilitate the development of a consensual plan of reorganization.” 11 U.S.C. § 1183(b)(7).

That’s what we Subchapter V trustees are supposed to do.

Ok, fine. But how are we supposed to do that?

A facilitation tool that many Subchapter V trustees are using is this: Zoom facilitation meetings.

What follows is an explanation of how such meetings can work.

Initial Meeting

A bankruptcy discharge “does not discharge an individual debtor from any debt– . . . for fraud or defalcation while acting in a fiduciary capacity.” 11 U.S.C. § 523(a)(4).

The effect of this “fiduciary capacity” statute is newly before the U.S. Supreme Court on a petition for certiorari in Spring Valley Produce, Inc. v. Forrest, Case No. 22-502.

The question presented in Spring Valley is this:

Assignments for benefit of creditors (“ABC”) are rarely used in these United States. That’s for two reasons: (i) some states have no ABC statute and do not recognize the common law of ABCs, and (ii) other states have onerous ABC statutes that no one wants to use.

The State of Illinois is an exception: ABCs are regularly and frequently used there, under the common law of trusts, because the ABC process is an efficient and effective tool for liquidating a failed or failing business. There is no ABC statute in Illinois.

In this client alert we set out some of the key lessons from the recent judgment in ABT Auto Investments Ltd v Aapico Investment Pte Ltd [2022] EWHC 2839 (Comm), which considers the validity of appropriation as an enforcement power pursuant to Regulation 17 of the Financial Collateral Arrangements (No. 2) Regulations 2003 (“FCARs”), the duty imposed on a collateral-taker by Regulation 18 of the FCARs in connection with the valuation of a collateral subject to appropriation, and provides useful guidance on what is “commercially reasonable” in this context.

Every now and then we get a bankruptcy opinion declaring a rule with broad application that, (i) may make sense is specific situations, but (ii) is a terrible result for others.

Here’s an Exhibit A opinion for such a proposition: Reinhart Foodservice LLC v. Schlundt, Case No. 21-cv-1027 in the U.S. District Court for Eastern Wisconsin, (Doc. 12, issued October 27, 2022).

The Facts

Poor Chicago. 

Unlike the result for Chicago’s traffic ticket income in Fulton v. Chicago, the U.S. Supreme Court refuses to rescue Chicago in City of Chicago v. Mance (Case No. 22-268; Cert. denied, 11/21/2022).[Fn. 1]

Four decades and several years ago, Congress repeals the Federal Bankruptcy Act of 1898 and replaces it with the Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1978, aka the “Bankruptcy Code.”[Fn. 1]

A decade later, Justices on the U.S. Supreme Court are still disparaging the new Bankruptcy Code as the “sweeping changes Congress instituted in 1978” and “the radical reforms of 1978.”[Fn. 2]

Over the span of two weeks in July 2022, two of the largest retail-facing cryptocurrency platforms, Celsius and Voyager, filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.