On December 22, New York AG Schneiderman announced that more than 3,000 consumers received partial compensation from funds stemming from a global settlement negotiated by AG Schneiderman and the CFPB.
On December 14, 2015, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that claims arising from securities of a debtor’s affiliate must be subordinated to all claims or interests senior or equal to claims of the same type as the underlying securities in the bankruptcy proceeding.
Owners of small business entities are frequently required to guaranty the debts of such entities. Those business entities might later file for Chapter 11, and may be able to achieve confirmation of a plan to restructure their indebtedness. The question then presented is whether this confirmation event affects the separate guaranty obligations of the owners? The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals recently explored this issue in In re: Larry
A secured lender had to “pay the [encumbered] Property’s maintenance expenses incurred while the [bankruptcy] trustee was trying to sell the Property,” held the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on Dec. 29, 2015. In re Domistyle, Inc., 2015 WL 9487732, at *1 (5th Cir. Dec. 29, 2015).
The U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Middle District of Florida recently held that:
What better time than the holiday season to discuss “gifting” in the context of chapter 11 cases. “Gifting” commonly refers to the situation where a senior creditor pays (or allocates a portion of its collateral for the benefit of) one or more junior claimholders. Gifting is often employed as a tool to resolve the opposition of a junior class of creditors, who are typically out-of-the-money, to the manner in which the bankruptcy case is being administered. For instance, creditors’ committees may seek gifts from senior creditors to guarantee a recovery for general unsecured
In a case addressing what it means to "surrender" property under the Bankruptcy Code, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida recently held that a Chapter 7 trustee's abandonment of real property only restores legal title to the debtors as if no bankruptcy petition had been filed, and does not also give the debtors the right to contest the mortgagee's foreclosure if the debtors elected to surrender the property.
If Party A files an involuntary bankruptcy case against Party B that is contested by Party B, and if Party A fails to convince a bankruptcy court that Party B should be a debtor in such involuntary bankruptcy case, the general rule is that Party A must pay the reasonable attorneys’ fees incurred by Party B in successfully obtaining dismissal of the involuntary filing.
In its decision in Lazzo v. Bank (In re Schupach Investments, L.L.C.), 2015 WL 6685416 (10th Cir. 2015), the Tenth Circuit sent a clear message to attorneys representing debtors-in-possession: make sure you have authority to represent the debtor if you want to be compensated from the estate.
The Bankruptcy Forms Modernization Project is an initiative that will require filers to use new bankruptcy forms effective December 1, 2015. The new forms are part of a forms modernization project that was started by the Advisory Committee on Bankruptcy Rules in 2008. The petitions, schedules and other official forms will all be revised, reformatted and renumbered. The goal of the initiative is to improve the interface between technology and the forms to increase efficiency and reduce the need to produce the same information in multiple formats.