Chapter 15 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, 11 U.S.C. §§ 1501 et seq., provides the legal framework by which U.S. bankruptcy courts recognize foreign insolvency proceedings of companies that have assets and operations in more than one country. Congress added Chapter 15 to the Bankruptcy Code with the enactment of the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005. Like any new law, the application and limits of Chapter 15 are developing through jurisprudence.

This appeal is from an order by a district court in California, affirming a bankruptcy court’s denial of a motion to compel arbitration in a Chapter 7 bankruptcy trustee’s adversary proceeding, in which the trustee sought avoidance of fraudulent transfers.

A statutory instrument has recently been passed providing that the Third Parties (Rights Against Insurers) Act 2010 will, finally, come into force on 1 August 2016, some six years after it was first passed.

The act will replace and, in general, streamline the procedures put in place by the Third Parties (Rights Against Insurers) Act 1930. Perhaps the two most significant changes brought about by the 2010 Act are:

The Copenhagen Reinsurance Company (CopRe) asked the UK High Court to make an Order sanctioning the intra-group transfer of the whole of its (re)insurance business to the Marlon Insurance Company (Marlon). Each of CopRe and Marlon wrote US excess and surplus lines insurance, and each of them maintained an excess and surplus lines trust fund in New York. The purpose of the transfer was to simplify the structure of the Enstar group. If the transfer was sanctioned, CopRe would be dissolved without winding up.

As discussed in an earlier post called “Going Up: Bankruptcy Code Dollar Amounts Will Increase On April 1, 2016,” various dollar amounts in the Bankruptcy Code and related statutory provisions were increased for cases filed on or after today, April 1, 2016.

Florida’s proceedings supplementary statute (Fla. Stat. 56.29) provides a wide range of collection options to judgment creditors. Over the years, courts inconsistently applied various parts of the statute, which had remained virtually unchanged since its enactment approximately a century ago. The result was widespread confusion among the courts and practitioners concerning how parties were summoned into court, how to commence proceedings, and parties’ rights under the statute.

In various posts, the latest of which was September 2, 2015, Reinsurance Focus has covered developments in the liquidation of The Home Insurance Company.

The Seventh Circuit (which covers Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin) appears to have added a new and potentially conflicting standard in analyzing  a third-party transferee’s “good faith” defense to a fraudulent transfer claim.  The good faith defense protects a third-party transferee from having to return the value it received from a debtor as a part of a fraudulent transaction so long as that third-party transferee entered into the transaction with the debtor in good faith. 

This post originally appeared on In The (Red): The Business Bankruptcy Blog, which I created for CEOs, CFOs, boards of directors, credit professionals, in-house counsel and others to stay informed about important business bankruptcy issues and developments.

An official notice from the Judicial Conference of the United States was just published announcing that certain dollar amounts in the Bankruptcy Code will be increased ever so slightly — only about 3% this time — for new cases filed on or after April 1, 2016.