With a decree of 11 March 2015 the Tribunal of Reggio Emilia, recalling the case-law principle of the socalled “consecution” of insolvency procedures, rejected the pleading in the proof of debt procedure of a creditor who requested its own post-concordato debt towards the then bankrupt company to be set off against its own pre-concordato receivable.

The case

The Constitutional Court (6 December 2017) confirmed that Art. 147, para. 5, of the Italian Bankruptcy Law does not violate the Constitution as long as it is interpreted in a broad sense

The case

With two decisions (No. 1895/2018 and No. 1896/2018), both filed on 25 January 2018, the Court of Cassation reached opposite conclusions in the two different situations

The case

With the decision No. 1649 of 19 September 2017 the Court of Appeals of Catania followed the interpretation according to which a spin-off is not subject to the avoiding powers of a bankruptcy receiver

The case

What Happened: The Third Circuit Court of Appeals joined five other circuits in holding that the unforeseen business circumstances exception excused WARN notice where an event outside the employer's control that would trigger layoffs was possible but not probable to occur.

The Larger Landscape: While the Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, and Tenth Circuits have also adopted a probability standard for determining when the unforeseen business circumstances exception applies, the other circuits have not yet ruled on the issue.

Key Points

Debtors beware: The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has recently expanded the ability of parties to appeal a bankruptcy court's approval of a sale of assets notwithstanding the statutory mootness rule set forth in section 363(m) of the Bankruptcy Code.

On June 13, 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld lower court rulings declaring unconstitutional a 2014 Puerto Rico law, portions of which mirrored chapter 9 of the Bankruptcy Code, that would have allowed the commonwealth’s public instrumentalities to restructure a significant portion of Puerto Rico’s bond debt (widely reported to be as much as $72 billion). In Commonwealth v. Franklin Cal. Tax-Free Tr., 2016 BL 187308 (U.S.

In Weisfelner v. Blavatnik(In re Lyondell Chemical Company), 2017 BL 131876 (Bankr. S.D.N.Y. Apr. 21, 2017), the bankruptcy court presiding over the chapter 11 case of Lyondell Chemical Company ("Lyondell") handed down a long-anticipated opinion in the protracted litigation concerning the failed 2007 merger of Lyondell with Basell AF S.C.A. ("Basell"), a Netherlands-based petrochemical company.

Recent Developments