ntroduction The priority of governments and financial authorities around the world in 2023, including in Canada, has been to reduce inflation while monitoring and addressing financial sector risks. The Bank of Canada estimates that inflation will likely remain near 3% through 2024, given strong household spending levels supported by tight labour markets, population growth and high levels of accumulated household savings.
KENYA
Economic overview
Sam Bankman-Fried is scheduled to be tried on eight charges starting on 3 October 2023, and US District Judge Lewis Kaplan has allowed for a second trial on 11 March 2024 on a further five charges that include bribing Chinese officials and committing financial fraud. The charges centre around the alleged fraud and conspiracy to defraud crypto investors and customers in FTX and Alameda Research.
The recent ex-tempore judgment of Kawaley J in Atom Holdings1 in the Grand Court of the Cayman Islands serves as a timely reminder to practitioners and industry participants alike that obtaining an adjournment of a winding-up petition2 requires cogent evidence demonstrating good reason(s) for delaying what is otherwise the collective right of creditors to seek relief via court intervention.
‘Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here’[1] — John J Ray III
The recent failure of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange highlights the need for investors and market participants to do their due diligence when it comes to corporate governance. Assumptions around the competency of individual directors and the corporate governance standards in various jurisdictions left some FTX investors writing off hundreds of millions of dollars invested in FTX.
This Part of the 2023 edition of R+I In Brief provides key industry and sector insights relating to the restructuring space over the past year. These hot topics include:
Mac Interiors Limited (the Company), a Northern Ireland-incorporated company, has become the first company incorporated outside the Irish State (and the EU) to have an examiner appointed under the examinership regime provided for in section 509 of the Companies Act 2014 (the 2014 Act).
Whilst AI is leading the agenda when it comes to the future of technology, fintech still remains the ace in the pack for investors. In fact, fintech businesses contribute more than £10 billion to the UK economy every year – supporting 76,000 jobs.
Fintechs also tend to outperform firms in other sectors too, with an annualised growth rate of 16% over the past decade, against 1.3% for the average SME.
Belgium is finally about to transpose Directive 2019/2023 on preventive restructuring frameworks and regulated pre-pack proceedings are now accessible.
European and Belgian legislative developments
Insolvency law has experienced significant activity in recent years, both at European level and at Belgian level, in favour of a paradigm shift of restructuring through pre-pack proceedings instead of liquidation.
On June 27, 2023, the Official Committee of Unsecured Creditors (the “Committee”) in the BlockFi Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization case filed an Objection to the company’s Plan and essentially requested that the company be liquidated. The Official Committee is made up largely of 600,000 individual customers of BlockFi.