Op 12 juli 2022 is het wetsvoorstel Tijdelijke wet transparantie turboliquidatie (het "wetsvoorstel") ingediend. Het wetvoorstel ziet op de tijdelijke aanpassing van de wettelijke regeling omtrent turboliquidatie en bevindt zich nog in de voorbereidingsfase.

We are heading into the holiday season. It’s a Wonderful Life will be on television. And cryptocurrency bankruptcies will be in the news. Yesterday, BlockFi filed for bankruptcy. What does a seventy year old Frank Capra movie – about a bank run in a small town during the Great Depression – tell us about the latest crypto platform’s liquidity crisis? Will depositors get their money back? Is there any insurance for the creditors?

Lawyers occasionally wonder how the law ended up as it is. We had that experience after the Dutch Supreme Court’s decision of 1 July 2022 (Rabobank/Ten Berge q.q.; ECLI:NL:HR:2022:984), regarding the possibility or impossibility of pledging a claim. The Supreme Court decided that claims that have been made non-transferable under property law in a contractual agreement between a creditor and a debtor, cannot be pledged either.

A key temporary bankruptcy related response to the pandemic has been re-implemented and extended with the passage of the Bankruptcy Threshold Adjustment and Technical Corrections Act (the “Act”) which extends the increase in the subchapter V debt limit for eligible businesses to $7.5 million for another two years.

A key bankruptcy-related response to the pandemic has ended as the increased debt limits under subchapter V of chapter 11, passed by Congress in the CARES Act, have expired. In an effort to provide bankruptcy relief and access to subchapter V of chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Code to a greater number of small businesses, Congress raised the debt limit for subchapter V eligibility from the original $2,725,625 million to $7.5 million via the CARES Act, passed in March of 2020.

“I did not want you to hear this on the news for the first time, but we are filing for bankruptcy next week.” “This is a difficult call to make. We are going out of business and will probably be filing a chapter 7 in the next couple of days.” Needless to say, bankruptcy is problematic for a licensor: the licensee may cease performing, the royalty stream may run dry, and the licensee or a trustee could attempt to sell or assign the license in bankruptcy to an undesirable licensee, or even a competitor.

A recent case out of the Eastern District of California addressed the split in authority on whether an inaccurate credit report alone is enough to establish a concrete injury in fact for purposes of Article III standing.

Since 9 January 2022, the public type of the Dutch Scheme is automatically recognized in the EU under the European Insolvency Regulation. This will be further discussed in this blog.

Last year saw the introduction of the Dutch Scheme (we refer to our previous blogs for further details on the Dutch Scheme).

On 28 June 2021, the Minister of Justice presented a draft temporary bill on transparency of expedited liquidations (de tijdelijke wet transparantie turboliquidatie). As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Minister expects that there will be an increase in the number of businesses that will need to be liquidated. Under Dutch law, the most efficient way to do this is through expedited liquidation (turboliquidatie). However, as the expedited liquidation barely provides for safeguards to creditors, it is often considered a mechanism that is open for abuse.

The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals recently reversed summary judgment entered in favor of Experian Information Solutions, Inc. (“Experian”) in a Fair Credit Reporting Act claim brought by Henry Losch (“Losch”) finding not only that Losch had standing to bring the claims but also that Experian’s investigation of Losch’s credit reporting dispute was not “reasonable as a matter of law.” Losch v. Nationstar Mortgage LLC d.b.a. Mr. Cooper, -- F. 3d. --, 2021 WL 1653016, *1 (11th Cir. April 28, 2021).