Either from our prior posts here and here, or from the great posts from Stone and Baxter’s Plan Propon

On April 15, 2016, the IRS released a generic legal advice memorandum (GLAM 2016-001) (the “April GLAM”) addressing the impact of so-called “bad boy” guarantees (also known as nonrecourse carve-out guarantees) on the characterization of underlying partnership debt as recourse vs. nonrecourse under Section 752 of the Internal Revenue Code.

In some good news for commercial vendors, the Supreme Court of Texas recently ruled that payments for ordinary services provided to an insolvent customer are not recoverable as fraudulent transfers, even if the customer turns out to be a “Ponzi scheme” instead of a legitimate business.

Preference actions are, for the most part, insanity. We won’t go on a tirade here. But recently, a ruling brings common sense to the “new value” defense.

There are many tenants that are, shall we say, “problem children.” They pay late, open late, breach, junk up your strip or building, threaten, the works. Sometimes, the landlord finds it easier just to reach a lease termination agreement with such a tenant, with the parties walking away with a mutual release. If the lease is below market, or the landlord is really motivated to move this tenant along, the landlord even provides some “keys money” to terminate the lease.

Shareholders who received nearly $8 billion from the Tribune Company leveraged buyout (LBO) do not have to give back that money as a constructive fraudulent transfer. Although the possibility remains that the creditors can recover this money through the pending intentional fraudulent transfer claims, which are much more difficult to prove, the Second Circuit recently held that the Bankruptcy Code preempts creditors from recovering under state constructive fraud theories when shareholders receive distributions under securities contracts effectuated through financial institutions.

Creditors seeking to exercise control over a borrower or collateral may utilize a number of remedies. They may seek a foreclosure or UCC sale, assignment for the benefit of creditors, file an involuntary bankruptcy petition under Section 303 of the Bankruptcy Code (if they hold unsecured claims),[1] or, seek the appointment of a receiver.

In an appeal certified directly from the Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware (the “Bankruptcy Court”) to the Court of Appeals, the Third Circuit issued a ruling upholding Judge Kevin Gross’s decision that a chapter 11 debtor-employer may reject the continuing terms and conditions of a collective bargaining agreement (“CBA”) under 11 U.S.C. § 1113, despite that the CBA expired post-petition.

The Bankruptcy Court’s Decision

Editor’s Note: Our good London colleague Ed Marlow recently published this as a Bryan Cave client advisory.

A recent bankruptcy court decision from the influential Southern District of New York permitted a debtor to reject executory contracts with midstream gathers as an exercise of sound business judgment. In In re Sabine Oil & Gas Corporation, the court issued an advisory ruling in which it determined that certain provisions of the rejected contracts were not covenants that ran with the land, and thus could be rejected thereby relieving the debtor of a financial hardship.