It is very much the nature of the job that appointed Office Holders are required to make difficult and challenging decisions on each and every case they take. On some occasions those decisions are well received – on others, not so well. Creditors affected by those decisions can take comfort that the Office Holder is experienced in making those difficult decisions, is an Officer of the Court, has their own licence to protect and, fundamentally, has a duty to treat all creditors fairly.
The trading environment for Britain’s pubs has never been tougher. According to the Campaign for Real Ale, 29 pubs close every week in the UK, with pubs selling approximately a third of the number of pints that they used to sell in the late 1970s.
Today is the closing date for responses to a Government consultation on the tax treatment of company distributions. You can read the consultation document here.
The direction of travel, per the consultation, is clear. Anyone thinking of liquidating their company should consider these new rules carefully.
The Insolvency Service recently published official statistics showing that the number of individual insolvencies in 2015 fell to the lowest annual level for a decade (by 19% to 79,965).
The statistics also show that:
Key point
An assignee of future debts was bound by discounting and rebate arrangements concluded between the assignor and its customers despite having given notice of the assignment.
The facts
M supplied goods to customers. It factored its debts to Bibby in 2000. The Factoring Agreement provided that all future debts due to M by customers were to vest upon their creation in Bibby.
Bibby did the following to try and protect its position – ultimately the steps proved unsuccessful:
Key Point
The word “advance” does not automatically imply an obligation to repay the funds advanced, nor does it automatically imply a repayment trigger.
The Facts
So-called “Creditor Portals”, and other similarly titled electronic platforms by which insolvency practitioners typically circulate any meaningful information to creditors about insolvent estates, have been a bugbear of mine ever since they were first used a little while ago. Don’t get me wrong; I absolutely applaud the attempt which they represent to minimise the amount of unnecessary paperwork circulating around the country and the savings of cost which they bring to the administration of insolvent estates where the cost of copying and posting alone would be absolutely frightening today.
When a company is facing financial difficulties, the Directors of that company should be aware to the procedures that must be followed in relation to redundancies in order to avoid prosecution.
A balanced view A quarterly update from our Real Estate Dispute Resolution team Winter/ Spring 2015/2016 Real Estate Dispute Resolution Issue 12 Contents Welcome to the Winter 2015/2016 edition of Eversheds In Focus. Since our Autumn 2015 edition, the Courts have considered a number of important cases on issues ranging from break options, the legitimacy of controversial rates avoidance schemes, relief from forfeiture, specific performance of contractual obligations and what constitutes a penalty payment.
The recent decisions in Re MF Global UK Ltd and Re Omni Trustees Ltd give conflicting views as to whether section 236 of the Insolvency Act 1986 has extra-territorial effect. In this article, we look at the reasoning in the two judgments and discuss a possible further argument for extra-territorial effect.
The conflicting rulings on section 236