The global M&A market has remained strong from the end of 2017 into 2018, with the total deals announced in the first half of 2018 making it the best period for global M&A yet. With stockholders pressuring larger companies to grow their revenues and the strong liquidity position of many companies, it is a sellers’ market.

Mining the wreckage

This article was first published on the Financial Times website on 10 September 2018.

It was the biggest bankruptcy in history – ten times bigger than Enron – and the tipping point into a global recession.

But what really happened on the ground during those fateful days, as the myth of certain banks being ‘too-big-to-fail’ exploded on a global scale?

It was a huge historical event, yet one with a distinctly human face.

Today’s business environment is truly global but in local markets, specific regulation, legislation, politics, demographics and culture have a material impact on how restructurings and insolvencies play out. Long thought of as one of the world’s leading restructuring hubs, the UK’s dominance is increasingly being challenged by other countries in the global restructuring market.

Singapore’s new (the Omnibus Bill) was passed by parliament on 1 October 2018 and is expected to come into force later this year or in early 2019.

The Omnibus Bill, which was introduced to parliament on 10 September 2018, consolidates Singapore's corporate and personal insolvency and restructuring laws into a single enactment. It also generally updates the insolvency legislation and introduces a significant number of new provisions, particularly in respect of corporate insolvency.

Summary

EBITDA first rose to prominence in the US leveraged buy-out craze of the 1980s and has since formed the key metric of leveraged finance transactions across the world. In this article, we focus on its evolution in the European loans market, and explore how financial covenant and certain other protections in loan documentation have been eroded in recent years as a result of those changes.

This article first appeared in the November edition of Butterworths Journal of International Banking and Financial Law. 

On 9 November 2017, in a rare example of a contested recognition hearing, His Honour Judge Paul Matthews granted recognition of Agrokor’s extraordinary administration (EA) as a foreign main proceeding under the Cross-Border Insolvency Regulations 2006 (CBIR).

Insurance claims represent assets in insolvency which may be capable of realisation or assignment by an insolvency practitioner (IP). If properly managed, such claims can prove to be a significant source of recovery. However, in practice, the benefits of insurance are often lost for a variety of reasons, including:

Use the Lexology Navigator tool to compare the answers in this article with those from other jurisdictions.

Director and parent company liability

Liability

Under what circumstances can a director or parent company be held liable for a company’s insolvency?

In a corporate world where the capital structures of companies are becoming increasingly complex, schemes of arrangements under the Companies Act 2006 have established themselves as the restructuring procedure of choice for many distressed companies. This popularity is evidenced by the fact that schemes of arrangement have been increasingly used by overseas companies wishing to restructure their debts under the flexibility offered by English law.