The Personal Insolvency Bill 2012 has passed Committee Stage in the Dáil. The Select Committee on Justice, Defence and Equality made a number of changes to the Bill, many of these being technical changes to clarify provisions or to correct inconsistencies.

Key changes

Some of the key changes made by the Select Committee were as follows:

The Irish telecommunications company eircom recently successfully concluded its restructuring through the Irish examinership process. This examinership is both the largest in terms of the overall quantum of debt that was restructured and also the largest successful restructuring through examinership in Ireland to date. The speed with which the restructuring of this strategically important company was concluded was due in large part to the degree of pre-negotiation between the company and its lenders before the process commenced.

The Bankruptcy Fees etc (Scotland) Regulations 2012 recently implemented some significant changes to the Accountant in Bankruptcy (AiB)’s fees structure.  Key changes include:

The much anticipated Personal Insolvency Bill has been published and introduces wide-ranging measures to seek to deal with the issue of personal debt affecting many people in the country today. The headline changes are the reduction of the period a person is bankrupt from 12 to 3 years and the introduction of three new debt resolution processes which, while being under the jurisdiction of the Courts are predominantly non judicial based processes involving the newly established Insolvency Service.

As some may be aware, the Court of Session last year issued a Practice Note on the subject of making applications to extend the period of administration beyond the initial 12 month period. 

The current position is that 8 players have been reported as having objected to their contracts of employment transferring to the "new Rangers". Charles Green has apparently threatened to litigate any departing players given that, in his view, they are in breach of contract.

Of all the headlines related to Rangers’ current financial plight one related to the world of sales finance is probably a surprise. However, Rangers’ administrators recently sought the opinion of the Court of Session on the club’s well publicised deal with Ticketus, under which Rangers sold to Ticketus rights to future season ticket sales.  Although the Ticketus deal is not, strictly, an invoice financing Lord Hodge’s opinion touches on several questions directly relevant to sales finance.
 

The Scottish Government launched a consultation on the question of the reform of Scotland’s bankruptcy law earlier this year, and a lengthy and detailed consultation paper was released.  Those of us who have heard the Accountant in Bankruptcy speak at conferences and the like over recent months eagerly awaited a discussion document which would reflect her guarded admission that things had perhaps swung rather too far in favour of debtors, and the time was right to try to redress that balance by looking towards the impact of debt on creditors.

On 30 March 2012, the European Commission published a consultation on the future of European insolvency law.

The cornerstone of European insolvency law is Regulation (EC) No 1346/2000, known as the Insolvency Regulation. The Insolvency Regulation has been in force since 31 May 2002 and applies whenever a debtor has assets or creditors in more than one member state. It sets out provisions in relation to jurisdiction, recognition, applicable law and the coordination of insolvency proceedings opened in several member states.

This blog is supposed to be about real estate, mostly commercial real estate.  So when one of my Celtic-supporting partners who has been watching avidly every twist and turn of the Rangers saga said I should read the latest court judgement and what it said about property law, I was a little surprised.  But there is quite a lot that is relevant to what we do on a day to day basis.