Recently, the bankruptcy court presiding over the Energy Futures chapter 11 case issued an opinion analyzing the interplay between an intercreditor agreement’s distribution waterfall and payments to be made under the debtors’ multi-step reorganization plan. The court rejected a secured creditor’s argument that the intercreditor agreement’s distribution waterfall was triggered by one step of that reorganization.
The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s years-long litigation against the former CEO of MF Global Holdings Ltd. has concluded with a settlement. After the brokerage firm MF Global went bankrupt in a 2011 liquidity crisis, the CFTC sued CEO Jon Corzine for dipping into nearly $1 billion of segregated client funds in an effort to obtain badly needed liquidity. The settlement requires Corzine to pay a $5 million fine out of his own pocket, rather than from insurance.
On May 1, 2017, the U.S. Supreme Court announced that it would review the Seventh Circuit’s decision in FTI Consulting, Inc. v. Merit Management Group, LP, 830 F.3d 690 (7th Cir. 2016) (“Merit”), which addressed the scope of the safe harbor found in Section 546(e) of the Bankruptcy Code for settlement payments.
This article was published in a slightly different form in the November 2016 issue of Futures & Derivatives Law by The Journal on the Law of Investment & Risk Management Products.
Introduction
With the price of crude oil dropping in November 2014, many are asking if oil and gas producers are hedging at the current price levels. The following is a survey of the 30 largest public oil and gas producers and their hedging activities as disclosed in their Dec. 31, 2016 10-K filings.
The following survey provides as much information as possible based on what was disclosed in the filings. U.S. GAAP accounting rules form the minimum disclosures companies must provide in their filings to provide users with an understanding of:
Part 1 of this series described the recent decision of the ISDA Americas Determinations Committee to declare that a “failure to pay” had occurred with respect to iHeartCommunications Inc., notwithstanding that the only non-payment had been to a wholly owned subsidiary. The non-payment was orchestrated to avoid a springing lien that would have been triggered had all the notes of a particular issue of iHeartCommunications debt been paid in full. It did not reflect on the creditworthiness of iHeartCommunications.
The U.S. Bankruptcy Code gives debtors access to powerful rights and remedies that are not available under non-bankruptcy law. As a balance to these extraordinary powers however, a debtor may lose some or all control over its own affairs under certain circumstances. One of the rights that the debtor “puts into play” when it files bankruptcy is the attorney-client privilege (the Privilege).
As many investors anticipated, the deep trough in the commodities market over recent years resulted in a number of companies in commodity industries restructuring their balance sheets through a Chapter 11 bankruptcy process. Because companies often reorganize in the midst of a market downturn, a commodity company’s low EBITDA during this time usually results in low values being placed on the company’s reorganized equity.