Sova Capital Ltd (“Sova”) was an FCA authorised and regulated broker. Before it went into Special Administration, Sova provided investment brokerage services to institutional and corporate clients, mostly trading in the Russian market.
The war in Ukraine continues and the economic effect of sanctions against businesses that are connected to the Russian government are now being felt in earnest. Unsurprisingly, sanctions are becoming an increasingly hot topic for insolvency practitioners.
Recent months have seen the Courts hand down some important decisions, which provide helpful guidance on situations where the sanctions regime interfaces with insolvency processes. We have summarised three of the most significant in this article.
Summary
In the recent Court of Appeal decision Bacci v Green [2022] EWCA Civ 1393 the Court, upholding the decision of the High Court, held that a judgment debtor can be ordered to delegate authority to waive valuable tax protection and draw pension where doing so would enable creditors to extract what they were owed.
The Facts
In 2017, Matthew Green, son of established Mayfair art dealer Richard Green, committed fraud in obtaining loans from FundingSecure.
On 28 October 2022, the High Court handed down judgment in the case of Alma Property Management Ltd v Crompton And Another [2022] EWHC 2671 (Ch).
In this case, the (freeholder) Claimant sought an order for specific performance of the (leaseholder) Defendants' repairing obligations under a lease of the common parts of a block of flats called North Tower in Manchester.
Further to our previous article, which can be found here, we consider the key issues with which the Court faced, the technical legal analysis underpinning this judgment and our view on what this may mean for energy suppliers, and the sector as a whole, looking forward.
Background - what was the application and why was it needed?
Once hailed as having the potential to add £5.7 billion to the UK economy in 2016, Northern business leaders operating in the tech space met to discuss how best to unlock the sector's growth potential. As part of CyberFest, Womble Bond Dickinson, alongside a host of tech experts and business leaders, aimed to tackle the issue head-on in an insightful roundtable.
The Supreme Court has been given its first opportunity to “address the existence, scope and engagement of an alleged duty of company directors to consider, or to act in accordance with, the interests of the company’s creditors when the company becomes insolvent, or when it approaches, or is at real risk of, insolvency”. The corporate restructuring and insolvency community has been waiting for this “momentous” judgment with anticipation for the last 17 months.
The facts of the case:
The long, long awaited Supreme Court Judgment in the Sequana case is finally here. Firstly, for those who may have forgotten what the Supreme Court was grappling with, the issue was 'whether the trigger for the directors’ duty to consider creditors is merely a real risk of, as opposed to a probability of or close proximity to, insolvency'.
The Insolvency Service has reported the first disqualifications under new legislation introduced to tackle the practice of directors dissolving companies in order to evade debts.
Summary
On 21 March 2022, the High Court in Counsel General for Wales and others v Allen and others [2022] EWHC 647 (Ch) (Re Baglan Operations Ltd) modified the decision of the Official Receiver to allow the insolvent Baglan Operations Limited (in liquidation) (the 'Company') to continue trading for a period of time to prevent environmental harm to the locality.