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.

Yushan Ng and Helen Ward, Cadwalader Wickersham & Taft

This is an extract from the first edition of GRR's The Art of the Ad Hoc. The whole publication is available here. 

Chris Howard, Sullivan & Cromwell

This is an extract from the first edition of GRR's The Art of the Ad Hoc. The whole publication is available here. 

The relationship of an ad hoc committee with its stakeholder constituency

No power to bind: the importance of the underlying finance documents in relation to decision making

Nick Angel, Peter Newman and Edward Rasp, Milbank LLP

This is an extract from the first edition of GRR's The Art of the Ad Hoc. The whole publication is available here. 

Role and powers

Yen Sum and Lucy Cox, Sidley Austin

This is an extract from the first edition of GRR's The Art of the Ad Hoc. The whole publication is available here. 

How many committees?

In a capital structure involving multiple external debt tranches, one of the first questions that arises is the number of committees that will be required.

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.