Irish company law provides that if a charge granted by a company is not registered in the Companies Registration Office (CRO) within 21 days of its creation, it is void against a liquidator and any creditor of the company. There is a duty imposed on a company which grants a charge to register the charge in the CRO but the creditor taking the charge can also do so.

Diamond Rock Developments Ltd (the Company) granted a mortgage over a property. That mortgage was registered in the Land Registry but was not registered in the CRO.

If you supply goods, the simplest step that you can take to reduce your exposure to a customer’s insolvency is to use effective retention of title (RoT).

However not all RoT clauses are effective and we see many RoT claims rejected in insolvency.

By default, once you sell goods on credit:

• the goods belong to the customer; and
• the customer owes you the purchase price.

This means that if an insolvency practitioner (IP) is appointed to the customer:

The Supreme Court handed down its judgment on the case of Rakusen v Jepsen on 1 March 2023, deciding that rent repayment orders cannot be made against superior landlords.

The case considered whether rent repayment orders (RROs) under the Housing and Planning Act 2016, could be made against immediate landlords only, or whether superior landlords are also liable. 

This is the third article in our series about sponsor licences. This article focuses on the effect of insolvency on a sponsor licence.

Businesses are facing challenging times in the current economic downturn and insolvency is a real possibility for many, with 5,595 company insolvencies in the third quarter of 2022[1] alone.

If a business is on the brink of insolvency this will potentially have an impact on any sponsorship licences held within the company group. But what are the implications of this and what does it mean for sponsored employees?

On 16th December 2022 the Bankruptcy Master released an update which advised that the restriction on filing new creditors' winding up petitions is likely to be lifted in the new term. The court has advised that further information will be issued to legal practitioners in advance of the new guidance.

Corporate Enforcement Authority Issues Helpful Guidance Note

The Preventative Restructuring Directive

In July 2022, the European Union (Preventive Restructuring) Regulations 2022 (the Regulations) transposed the requirements of EU Directive 2019/1023 (the Preventative Restructuring Directive) into Irish law.

Certain of the consequential amendments to the Companies Act 2014 (the Act) relate to the duties and responsibilities that directors of companies have in circumstances of financial difficulty and/or insolvency.

Corporate insolvency numbers continued to appear artificially low in 2022. The expectation is that they will rise once businesses need to deal with the aftermath of Government pandemic supports and, in particular, start to pay warehoused taxes.

The Supreme Court handed down its long-awaited judgment in BTI 2014 LLC v. Sequana S.A. [2022] UKSC 25 (Supreme Court - BTI v Sequana) concerning the fiduciary duty of directors to act in good faith in the interests of the company.

Some 12 months ago, following the publication of that year’s Courts Service Annual Report, we suggested that 2020 would be remembered as a year like none other. However, a year later, the publication of the Courts Service Annual Report for 2021 (Report) describes a year of legal activity, in a debt recovery context, that very closely mirrors 2020.

The European Union (Preventive Restructuring) Regulations 2022 were signed on 27 July 2022 to give effect to an EU directive (Directive (EU) 2019/1023). The Directive aims to ensure that member states have in place effective frameworks for early warning and prevention of corporate insolvency.