So, a ruling came out in June that we in The Bankruptcy Cave have been dying to blog about (and not just so we can use the blog title above). Forgive the delay – heavy workloads and summer vacations often preclude timely blog posts. But this one is a doozy, better late than never on this blog post.
In some good news for commercial vendors, the Supreme Court of Texas recently ruled that payments for ordinary services provided to an insolvent customer are not recoverable as fraudulent transfers, even if the customer turns out to be a “Ponzi scheme” instead of a legitimate business.
There has been a relatively recent uptick in plaintiffs’ counsel filing putative class actions in multiple state and federal courts for alleged violations of a debtor’s bankruptcy discharge injunction based upon the debtor’s receipt of post-discharge mortgage-related communications. These claims assert putative class action challenges to post-discharge communications alleged to be attempts at personal collection of the discharged mortgage debt.
On January 17, 2014, Chief Judge Kevin Gross of the Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware issued a decision limiting the right of a holder of a secured claim to credit bid at a bankruptcy sale. In re Fisker Auto. Holdings, Inc., Case No. 13-13087-KG, 2014 WL 210593 (Bankr. D. Del. Jan. 17, 2014). Fisker raises significant issues for lenders who are interested in selling their secured debt and for parties who buy secured debt with the goal of using the debt to acquire the borrower’s assets through a credit bid.
On December 29, 2011, the FDIC filed suit against seven former directors of the Bank of Asheville in the Western District of North Carolina seeking to recover over $6.8 million in losses suffered by the bank prior to receivership. All of the directors named as defendants were members of the bank’s Loan Committee, the committee responsible “for the amplification, implementation and administration of the loan policy” and “management of the lending function”. The Complaint cites 30 specific commercial real estate and business loans approved by the defendants between June 26, 2007 a
Following a number of corporate governance failures in situations of insolvency, the Government has published a consultation paper (located here) aimed at cracking down on directors and employers behaving irresponsibly.
As we have noted in another post, Non-Final Finality: Does One Interlocutory Issue Resolved in a Bankruptcy Court Order Render All Issues Addressed in the Order Non-Appealable?, not all orders in bankruptcy cases are immediately appealable as a matter of right. Only those orders deemed sufficiently “final” may be appealed without additional court authorization.
While significant energy here at the Bankruptcy Cave is devoted to substantive bankruptcy matters, not all aspects of a general insolvency practice are always fun and litigation. Oftentimes insolvency lawyers add the most value by helping clients avoid a bankruptcy filing, or by successfully resolving a case through a consensual transactional restructuring.
Two recent cases serve as reminders the devil is truly in the details.
Preference actions are, for the most part, insanity. We won’t go on a tirade here. But recently, a ruling brings common sense to the “new value” defense.