A restructuring plan completed earlier this year by Smile Telecoms notches up a number of firsts.
African telecommunications provider Smile Telecoms Holding Limited, incorporated in Mauritius, successfully completed a restructuring plan (the Plan) under Part 26A of the UK Companies Act 2006 at the end of March 2021.
The Plan features a number of novel actions, including:
In her recent keynote speech, delivered at the 25th IBA Competition Conference on 10 September 2021, European Commission (the Commission) Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager called for a green revolution—the replacement of a linear economy with a circular one, coupled with investments in infrastructure.
What have we been up to?
Aside from our collective (but not wholly unexpected) disappointment that the lifting of the remaining Covid restrictions has been pushed back to 19 July, the team continue to advise on a wide range of insolvency related matters, amongst the recent highlights being:
Latham & Watkins operates worldwide as a limited liability partnership organized under the laws of the State of Delaware (USA) with affiliated limited liability partnerships conducting the practice in France, Hong Kong, Italy, Singapore, and the United Kingdom and as an affiliated partnership conducting the practice in Japan. Latham & Watkins operates in South Korea as a Foreign Legal Consultant Office. Latham & Watkins works in cooperation with the Law Office of Salman M. Al-Sudairi in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
The Channel Islands of Guernsey and Jersey did not introduce emergency insolvency legislation as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and do not presently have measures equivalent to those found in the UK’s Corporate Insolvency and Governance Act, 2020 (“CIGA”).
Antitrust team leader Edoardo Cazzato joins the firm with team
Il Decreto Legge n. 118/2021, proposto dalla Commissione Pagni ed approvato dal Consiglio dei Ministri ad inizio agosto, è stato pubblicato sulla Gazzetta Ufficiale n. 202 del 24 agosto (“Decreto”).
Con tale Decreto, il Governo ha introdotto nuove e ulteriori misure per contenere e superare le imponenti conseguenze prodotte dall’emergenza epidemiologica in materia di crisi d’impresa e risanamento aziendale.
To mitigate the risk of claims being made against them, personal representatives, solicitors and executors involved in distributing estates should commission bankruptcy and insolvency searches abroad as well as in the UK. However, there are also other areas of law where due diligence might include overseas searches. Commercial, planning and conveyancing lawyers should all consider international searches.
The High Court has ruled that a claim for a declaration regarding a borrower’s obligations to provide information under a facility agreement was not a claim which itself derived from borrower’s French insolvency proceedings for the purposes of Article 6(1) of the Recast European Insolvency Regulation (EU) 2015/848 (the “Recast Insolvency Regulation”).
The High Court has, for the first time since the introduction of the legislation in June 2020, refused to sanction a cross-class cram-down restructuring plan under Part 26A of the Companies Act. In In the matter of Hurricane Energy Plc [2021] EWHC 1759 (Ch), the court rejected a plan supported by bondholders because it had not been shown that the opposing shareholders had no better alternative prospects (i.e., the ‘no worse off condition’ had not been met).