Does this sound familiar? A newly formed entity purchases distressed bank debt after the debtor has proposed a reorganization plan. The purchaser obtains a blocking position and uses its negotiating leverage to obtain control of the plan process and ultimately the borrower’s assets, which have strategic importance to the purchaser.
The taxpayer was able to convince the court that the creditors who got the stock in the reorganization were not the prior owners. Because the events occurred in 1992, under a prior version of the continuity of proprietary interest rules, continuity of ownership was broken and a section 338(h)(10) election could be made and the basis in the assets inside the corporation stepped up to fair market value, with no tax liability because the seller was in bankruptcy with large net operating losses (NOLs).
The ability of a single asset real estate debtor in a bankruptcy case to utilize a non-consenting secured creditor's cash collateral has been limited by a recent decision from the Bankruptcy Appellate Panel of the Sixth Circuit in In re Buttermilk Towne Center, LLC, 2010 FED App. 0010P (B.A.P. 6th Cir. 2010).
BUSSON-SOKOLIK v. MILWAUKEE SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING (February 10, 2011)
The Federal Bankruptcy Act prohibits public and private employers from engaging in various discriminatory acts against individuals because they have filed for bankruptcy. 11 U.S.C. § 525. Inexplicably, the statutes applicable to public and private employers are not identical. The law applicable to a public employer, for example, specifically provides that it "may not . . . deny employment to" one who has filed for bankruptcy. 11 U.S.C. § 525(a). This "deny employment to" language does not appear in the statute for private employers. 11 U.S.C. § 525(b).
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) recently issued rulings regarding the availability of tax losses after a bankruptcy,1 the ability to take a loss under Sections 165(a) and 165(g),2 and the characterization of a loss after an ownership change.3 There are few rulings or other sources of authority for these types of issues, and thus, a review of these rulings provides insight into the IRS’s current thinking on the issues addressed.
PLR 201051020
On February 16, 2011, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled that a discounted cash flow analysis constituted “a commercially reasonable determinant[] of value” for purposes of section 562(a) of the United States Bankruptcy Code.1 In so doing, the court upheld the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware decision sustaining the objection of American Home Mortgage Holdings, Inc.
As discussed in previous posts on this site, back in December the Second Circuit Court of Appeals issued a summary order that reversed the bankruptcy court’s confirmation of the reorganization plan (the “Plan”) of DBSD North America, f/k/a ICO North America (“DBSD”).
What is credit bidding? Distilled to its most basic level, Section 363(k) of the Bankruptcy Code gives a secured creditor the right to use up to the full amount of the debt owed to the secured creditor by the debtor as currency in a bankruptcy auction sale of the collateral securing the debt owed to the secured creditor.
On Feb. 18, 2011, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals (the “Circuit Court”) held that (i) an assignment of unsecured contract claims from AT&T to ReGen Capital I, Inc. (“ReGen”) was broad enough to include right to receive “cure” payments in the event the debtor, UAL Corporation (“United”), assumed the underlying executory contracts, but (ii) ReGen could not successfully assert a “cure” claim because United had not assumed the executory contracts, even though United’s confirmed plan of reorganization included them on a list of assumed contracts. ReGen Capital I, Inc. v. UAL Corp.