Two recent court decisions may affect an equity sponsor’s options when deciding whether and how to put money into - or take money out of - a portfolio company. The first may expand the scope of “inequitable conduct” that, in certain Chapter 11 settings, could lead a court to equitably subordinate a loan made by a sponsor to its portfolio company, placing the loan behind all of the company’s other debt in the payment queue. The second decision muddies the waters of precedent under the U.S. Bankruptcy Code on the issue of the avoidability of non-U.S.

Lenders of troubled mortgages upon Massachusetts real property should carefully review their mortgages to avoid potential invalidation of such mortgages in bankruptcy. Bankruptcy courts in Massachusetts have led the charge in avoiding mortgages containing defects in notary clauses.

Massachusetts law requires that a validly executed acknowledgement be attached to a mortgage as a prerequisite to recording the mortgage in the registry of deeds.

In Providence Hall Associates Limited Partnership v. Wells Fargo Bank, N.A., the Fourth Circuit denied plaintiff’s attempt to receive a second bite at the apple, finding that plaintiff’s lawsuit was appropriately dismissed by the district court on res judicata grounds.

While secured creditors are entitled to special rights in bankruptcy, those rights may differ depending on whether creditors have a statutory or consensual lien on their collateral. This is primarily because section 552(a) of the Bankruptcy Code provides, in part, that “property acquired by the estate or by the debtor after the commencement of the case is not subject to any lien resulting from any security agreement . . .

(7th Cir. Mar. 22, 2016)

On February 5, 2016, the Office of Chief Counsel of the Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”) released a memorandum (a “Memo”) related to the appropriate tax treatment of individuals or entities that invest in real estate limited partnerships and limited liability companies (“LLCs”) with non-recourse financing.¹ In essence, the Memo determined that, for the taxpayer in question, (i) the existence of a tradi

On February 17, 2016, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (“FDIC”) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) (collectively, the “agencies”) jointly proposed a rule to supplement the statutory provisions of Title II of the Dodd-Frank Act (the “Orderly Liquidation Authority” or “OLA”) that govern the orderly liquidation of a “covered broker or dealer”—i.e., an SEC-registered broker or dealer that is a member of the Securities Investor Protection Corporation (“SIPC”) and for which a systemic risk determination to trigger the application of the OLA has been made.

The Supreme Court of Ohio recently held that a mortgage defectively executed but properly recorded still provides constructive notice of its contents.

A copy of the opinion is available at:  Link to Opinion.

The borrowers executed a promissory note and a mortgage.  The notary acknowledgment on the mortgage was left blank.  The mortgage was recorded with the notary section incomplete. The mortgage was later assigned.

You may recall the holding and analysis of ASARCO [1]/ from Jay’s previous post, here.

The Seventh Circuit (which covers Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin) appears to have added a new and potentially conflicting standard in analyzing  a third-party transferee’s “good faith” defense to a fraudulent transfer claim.  The good faith defense protects a third-party transferee from having to return the value it received from a debtor as a part of a fraudulent transaction so long as that third-party transferee entered into the transaction with the debtor in good faith.