The Supreme Court of Canada's ("SCC") recent decision in Peace River Hydro Partners v.

Insolvency practitioners and creditors facing voidable transaction claims will need to reassess the value of any potential or threatened unfair preference claims or other voidable transaction claims, following two important insolvency decisions in the High Court yesterday (Metal Manufactures Pty Limited v Morton [2023] HCA 1 (Metal Manufactures); Bryant v Badenoch Integrated Logging Pty Ltd [2023] HCA 2 (Badenoch).

It held that:

During the lifetime of a company some of the most difficult problems that a director faces are encountered if the company is in financial difficulty: not yet unable to pay its bills and insolvent but with a possibility that it may get to that position. At that stage the decisions made by a director may affect not only the survival and future of the company but also the director's own position.

Summary and comment

The Bankruptcy (Netting, Contractual Subordination and Non-petition Provisions) (Jersey) Law 2005 (the Netting Law) is a short law, expressed in seven articles, which gives statutory confirmation that netting, contractual subordination and non-petition provisions in agreements are enforceable in accordance with their terms before and after bankruptcy.

In a historical first female majority High Court Judgment, Bryant v Badenoch Integrated Logging Pty Ltd[1]saw all seven Judges unanimously uphold the decision to abolish the Peak Indebtedness Rule, and set in place the starting point for calculation of “all transactions” in a “running account”.

Incorporating the principles contained in EU insolvency directives, the new Italian Insolvency Code affirms the goal of resolving crises in the least traumatic way possible for the business. This represents a fundamental innovation of the underlying philosophy of Italian insolvency law and the remedies envisaged for companies in distress so that they may successfully restructure their outstanding exposure. Below, we provide a general overview of the Insolvency Code and its key remedies.

The Insolvency Code in brief

Since the introduction of the Corporate Insolvency and Governance Act 2020 (CIGA) and the creation of the new Part 26A restructuring plan procedure, questions have been raised about whether the cost of using such a procedure would restrict its use to larger, better capitalised companies.

In Worthy Lending LLC v. New Style Contractors. Inc., the New York Court of Appeals held that a security interest includes a lender’s right to force the borrower’s account debtors to remit payments directly to the lender, regardless of whether an event of default exists. Further, the court clarified that the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) does not provide a distinction between a security interest and an assignment.

In a decision that may provide much-needed boundaries around the permissibility of debtors created from “out-of-the-box” prepetition corporate transactions, on January 30, 2023, the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit issued a unanimous opinion dismissing Johnson & Johnson subsidiary LTL Management, LLC’s (“LTL”) chapter 11 case pending in the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of New Jersey as not being filed in good faith.¹

The phrase “projected disposable income” is a plan confirmation standard in all reorganization chapters of the Bankruptcy Code for individuals and businesses: