France has amended the safeguard procedure by which debtors facing difficulties may restructure their financial arrangements.
On March 8, 2011, France's highest court, the Cour de cassation, confirmed that CMBS borrower, Heart of la Défense SAS (Hold), and its Luxembourg parent company, Dame Luxembourg Sarl (Dame), were entitled to Court protection in France under Safeguard Proceedings (sauvegarde). Safeguard is a French bankruptcy process that resembles the U.S. Chapter 11 debtor-in-possession procedures, used most recently (and notably) in connection with the bankruptcies of General Motors and Lehman Brothers.
Decree n°2011-236 of 3 March 2011 (OJ of 4 March 2011) details the so-called sauvegarde financière accélérée introduced by Law n°2010-1249 of 22 October 2010 (OJ of 23 October 2010) (
Law n°2011-331 dated 28 March 2011 (OJ of 29 March 2011) relating to modernising the legal professions includes the creation of a secure Internet portal aiming at relaxing the formalities related to insolvency. This national portal will allow the sending and reception of legal proceedings documents, including statements of claim.
The recent Cour de Cassation ruling in respect of the safeguard proceedings opened by Heart of La Défense SAS ("SAS Holdco") and its parent company, Sarl Dame Luxembourg ("Dame"), overturned the earlier decision of the Paris Court of Appeal in February 2010. The decision reinstated the safeguard proceedings of the two companies that were initiated in November 2008.
Introduction
On 8 March 20111, the French Supreme Court issued an important decision for the restructuring, finance and private equity communities and their advisers in connection with the on-going litigation surrounding the Coeur Défense restructuring.
In France, when bankruptcy proceedings are instituted against a party involved in a pending arbitration it can result in conflicts between the applicable arbitration and insolvency rules. In that context, an arbitral tribunal sitting in France may be confronted with determining the extent to which they must defer to mandatory insolvency rules.
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2020
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INHALT
1. Sistierung der Pflicht zur Konkursanmeldung bei berschuldeten Gesellschaften .............................................................................................................................. 3
This quick guide summarises the duties that a managing director of a German GmbH (hereinafter "director") is subject to, and how those duties change when the company is insolvent or at risk of being insolvent.
It also gives an overview of the personal risk to directors when the company is in financial difficulty.
In July 2006, after a long and unsuccessful attempt to reach an out-of-court restructuring of the indebtedness of the Eurotunnel group of companies, the managers of the Eurotunnel group requested the opening of main insolvency proceedings for all the companies in France.