On September 21, 2011, FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection Director David Vladeck sent a letter to the court appointed consumer privacy ombudsman in the Borders Group, Inc. (Borders) bankruptcy proceeding advising against the sale of Border's customer information absent customer consent or significant restrictions on the transfer and use of the information.

A federal bankruptcy court in Florida has addressed an issue of first impression in its district regarding the degree of error necessary to render a financing statement “seriously misleading” under UCC 9-506.

Previously, we have discussed the risks involved in failing to name the debtor correctly on a financing statement. See CRaB Alert, February 2007, p. 14, “Calling Borrower ‘Mike’ Leads To Failure To Perfect.”

On July 28, 2008, the FDIC published a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking in the Federal Register seeking to establish recordkeeping requirements for qualified financial contracts (“QFCs”) held by banks in “troubled” condition. The purpose of the Proposed Rule is to enable the FDIC, upon receivership, to make expeditious and well-informed decisions with respect to the management of a failed bank’s QFC portfolio.

In Re NVMS, LLC, Case No. 308-01901 (Bkrtcy.M.D.Tenn. Mar 21, 2008)

The debtor in this case is a medical services company who contracted with Medical Billing Partnership (“MBP”) to handle all of its billing. After filing for bankruptcy, the debtor asked MBP to provide billing data so as to determine the status of claims, but MBP refused to provide the information due to the proprietary software. MBP did provide a hard copy as well as a CD-rom with the information in an unformatted text file.

Yesterday, in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, General Motors announced that it is currently attempting to restructure debt held by the U.S. Treasury Department. Under a current proposal, GM would convert at least 50% of its debt held by the U.S. Treasury Department into common shares. As a result of the conversion Treasury would hold greater than 50% of GM’s common shares.

On September 21, 2011, FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection Director David Vladeck sent a letter to the court appointed consumer privacy ombudsman in the Borders Group, Inc. (Borders) bankruptcy proceeding advising against the sale of Border's customer information absent customer consent or significant restrictions on the transfer and use of the information.

Xi Xiaoming, the deputy president of China’s Supreme People’s Court, said that the Supreme People’s Court has formally launched efforts to formulate judicial interpretations on the Enterprise Bankruptcy Law. The Court will conduct further research on several important legal issues arising from the new circumstances and problems which the courts have encountered since the introduction of the Enterprise Bankruptcy Law on 1 June 2007.

In the September, 2006 issue of Insolvency Notes, the effect of the overhaul of the bankruptcy laws in the Czech Republic was discussed. As was the case at that time, the new insolvency laws were to become effective July 1, 2007. It now appears that the effective date will be delayed. The lower house of Czech Parliament gave fast-track approval recently to a bill for delaying implementation of the new bankruptcy act by six months, to January 1, 2008. Senate and presidential approval is still needed.

Previously, on June 16, 2010, the Joint Administrators (the “Administrators”) of Lehman Brothers International (Europe) (“LBIE”) announced that they would be testing the feasibility of their so-called Consensual Approach to the resolution of LBIE’s unsecured creditor claims. They anticipated the Consensual Approach would be applicable to financial trading creditors ("FTCs") and conceptually outlined the Consensual Approach as follows:

Yesterday, in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, General Motors announced that it is currently attempting to restructure debt held by the U.S. Treasury Department. Under a current proposal, GM would convert at least 50% of its debt held by the U.S. Treasury Department into common shares. As a result of the conversion Treasury would hold greater than 50% of GM’s common shares.