The recent judgment of the Cayman Islands Court of Appeal ("CICA") in Asia Pacific Limited v ARC Capital LLC1 explains the approach that the Court will take when considering an application to strike-out a contributory's just and equitable winding up petition which is based on an offer to purchase the petitioner's shares at fair value.
The United States bankruptcy judge overseeing the liquidation of MF Global Inc., approved the trustee’s proposal to pay all unsecured general creditors $461 million. Once paid, this distribution would result in total distributions to unsecured general creditors of 72 percent of their approved claims.
The New York State Attorney General settled a lawsuit against Ernst & Young related to its involvement in the financial statement preparation of Lehman Brothers Holding, Inc. The NY AG had alleged that the auditing firm had countenanced Lehman’s inclusion of certain repurchase transactions as sales and not as financings, which permitted the firm to remove “tens of billions of dollars” of securities from its balance sheet. According to the NY AG, the repo transactions—known as “Repo 105”—“served no legitimate purpose.
The trustee for the liquidation of MF Global Inc. is seeking permission from the bankruptcy judge overseeing the firm’s dissolution to make a distribution of US $461 million to unsecured general creditors. If approved, this distribution would result in total distributions to unsecured general creditors of 72 percent of their approved claims. To date, the trustee has distributed 100 percent of approved claims of MF Global’s customers (totaling US $6.7 billion), and 100 percent of approved secured, priority and administrative claims.
The Companies Act 2014 (the "Act") was recently passed by the Irish parliament and is expected to be brought into force on 1 June 2015 (the "Commencement Date"). The Act is largely a consolidation and modernisation exercise.
However, there are a number of significant areas which modify existing companies legislation and which lenders will need to consider both in the run-up to the Commencement Date and afterwards. In particular these relate to:
The Court of Appeal has recently clarified that if a foreign company, being a shareholder of a Cayman Islands company, issues a winding up petition against that company and there is evidence that the petitioning company will be unable to pay an adverse costs order if the respondent is successful at trial, then the Cayman Islands court has an inherent jurisdiction to order the petitioning foreign company to provide security for the respondent's costs – Re Dyxnet Holdings1.
Last week, the Cayman Islands Court of Appeal handed down its judgment in Weavering Macro Fixed Income Fund Limited (in Liquidation) (the "Fund") v Stefan Peterson and Hans Ekstrom (the "Directors"). The appeal from the first instance decision was allowed and the Grand Court's order of 26 August 2011 was set aside.
On January 14, 2015, Target Corporation ("Target US") announced the exit of substantially all of its Canadian operations less than two years after opening its first Canadian stores in a strategic push to operate at least one store in every province of Canada. The following day, on January 15, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice (Commercial List) in Toronto (the "Court") granted Target Canada Co.