The Employment Appeal Tribunal has ruled in five conjoined appeals that TUPE applies in all administrations, since they constitute ”relevant insolvency proceedings” and not ”liquidation proceedings”. This will be the case even in “pre-pack” administrations, where a business is placed into administration but immediately sold to a purchaser who has been lined up to buy the business beforehand.

Last week the Employment Appeal Tribunal ruled in five conjoined appeals that TUPE applies in all administrations, since they constitute "relevant insolvency proceedings" and not "liquidation proceedings". This will be the case even in “pre-pack” administrations, where a business is placed into administration but immediately sold to a purchaser who has been lined up to buy the business beforehand.

Chinese telecom equipment firm Huawei Technologies said Monday that it would wait for a decision from President Obama before it acts on a U.S. national security panel’s recommendation that it divest 3Leaf Systems, a small U.S. technology firm that Huawei bought out of bankruptcy in May. Huawei, which recently claimed the rank of the world’s second-largest supplier of telecommunications equipment, acquired 3Leaf—a start-up provider of server technologies—without first notifying the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS).

A late October 2010 case Straw Realisations v Shaftsbury House illustrates the courts’ approach to technical and insolvency-based challenges regarding enforcement of adjudicators’ awards. Given the current spate of contractor insolvencies and popularity of adjudication, any trust facing an adverse adjudicator's decision in favour of its contractor should not pay without due consideration.

Regional landline network operator Fairpoint Communications is finally poised to emerge from Chapter 11 bankruptcy as a result of the decision of the Vermont Public Safety Board (VPSB) to approve the company’s amended reorganization plan. Vermont had been the lone holdout among Maine, New Hampshire and 15 other states that had previously endorsed the plan. The reorganization was precipitated largely by the financial burden of FairPoint’s $2.3 billion purchase of New England landlines from Verizon Communications in 2008.

A late-October 2010 case on adjudication illustrates the courts' approach to technical and insolvency-based challenges regarding enforcement of adjudicators' awards.

Haymills (Contractors) Ltd went into administration in August 2009 having already won one adjudication against its employer, Shaftsbury, and having just commenced another, which it subsequently also won. Given Haymills' administration, Shaftsbury refused to pay the amounts awarded in either adjudication, relying on numerous heads to resist payment:  

The cuts revealed in the Comprehensive Spending Review have not been quite as bad as the construction industry had apparently been expecting (£3.5 billion not as bad). Nevertheless there have still been billions of pounds shaved off various departmental budgets which will affect the construction industry. Where public spending has in the past been a reliable source of income, some companies are inevitably now going to feel the effect of the cuts.

On 7 September 2010 "property and environmental services giant" Connaught, which had large contracts with many local authorities for maintenance of social housing, went into administration. In the wave of publicity which followed, the administrator quickly announced that it had "sold" the "majority of the ongoing contracts and their related assets" to Lovell, a subsidiary of Morgan Sindall. Since then, announcements have been few and far between.

Introduction

In CML V, LLC v Bax, the Court of Chancery held that a creditor of JetDirect Aviation Holdings, LLC, a Delaware limited liability company ("JetDirect"), did not have derivative standing to assert breach of fiduciary duty claims against the board of managers of the insolvent JetDirect. The creditors would have had standing if JetDirect were a Delaware corporation, but the Court found that the Delaware LLC Act does not allow an LLC’s creditors to bring derivative claims when a Delaware LLC is insolvent (or at any other time).