In late 2017 the UK Government spent £60 million of taxpayers' money repatriating over 110,000 Monarch Airlines passengers stranded overseas.

The Airline Insolvency Review was created to "consider both repatriation and refund protection to identify the market reforms necessary to ensure passengers are protected".

In the recent case of 1st Fleet Pty Ltd (in liquidation), the Court clarified the information disclosure obligations of external administrators in the Insolvency Practice Schedule (Corporations) (IPSC) and Insolvency Practice Rules (Corporations) 2016 (Rules).

There is only a short time period for compliance, and there can be cost consequences for non compliance.

In business it is not uncommon for a director of a company to be owed money by that company.

If the commercial relationship breaks down, the director may think it is an option to serve a creditor’s statutory demand on the debtor company.

However, recent court decisions demonstrate that issuing a creditor’s statutory demand is not a sure fire method of obtaining payment where the director is owed the debt personally or is a director of both the creditor and debtor companies.

Cases where statutory demands have been successfully challenged

The Personal Properties Securities Register (PPSR) will be seven years old on 30 January 2019; accordingly, security interests with seven year registration periods will, unless renewed, expire from 30 January 2019.

The seven year security interest is the most common registration period and is the maximum period of registration for goods with a serial number (such as motor vehicles). According to the Australian Financial Security Authority, an estimated 115,239 registrations will expire in January 2019.

On 1 October 2018, the Singapore Parliament passed the Insolvency, Restructuring and Dissolution Bill (the "Bill"), an omnibus legislation which will consolidate Singapore's personal insolvency, corporate insolvency and restructuring laws, which are currently under separate legislative regimes.

The overhaul follows recent amendments to the corporate insolvency and restructuring provisions of the Singapore Companies Act, and is part of a wider effort to boost the debt restructuring ecosystem in Singapore.

Key provisions introduced by the bill

1. Genussrechte können nur dann als inhaltsgleiche Schuldverschreibungen aus Gesamtemissionen dem Schuldverschreibungsgesetz unterfallen, wenn sie in einer Urkunde verbrieft sind (Genussschein).
2. In einem Prozess über Rechte der Schuldverschreibungsgläubiger aus den Schuldverschreibungen sind diese auch dann Partei des Prozesses, wenn sie einen gemeinsamen Vertreter bestellt haben.
3. Die Vertretungsmacht im Insolvenzverfahren berechtigt den gemeinsamen Vertreter auch ohne vorhergehenden gesonderten Beschluss der Gläubigerversammlung, der Forderungsanmeldung eines anderen Gläu

Foreign judgments may be enforced in Australia under the Foreign Judgments Act 1991 or, if that Act does not apply, pursuant to common law principles.

Registration and enforcement pursuant to the Foreign Judgments Act 1991

In the recent court decision of Trenfield v HAG Import Corporation (Australia) Pty Ltd [2018] QDC 107, the liquidators recovered unfair preferences from a retention of title creditor who argued it was a secured creditor.

The issues

In the recent decision of Heavy Plant Leasing [2018] NSWSC 707, a creditor successfully defended an unfair preference claim by establishing it did not have reasonable grounds to suspect the insolvency of the debtor company, who was a subcontractor in the earth moving business.

The most common way of defending a liquidator’s unfair preferences claim is to rely upon section 588FG(2) of the Corporations Act 2001(Cth); commonly called the ‘good faith defence’.

Commonly, a creditor being sued by a liquidator to refund an alleged unfair preference is owed money by the company in liquidation.

Liquidators argue that under section 553(c)(1) of the Corporations Act 2001 (Act) a creditor is not able to set-off the outstanding indebtedness owed by the company to the creditor to reduce any liability of the creditor to refund any unfair preference. Similar arguments are made by liquidators in relation to insolvent trading claims.

A snapshot of the court decisions