In Short:

The Situation: In Bakhshiyeva v Sberbank of Russia, a debtor sought to restructure English law-governed debts pursuant to an Azerbaijani restructuring proceeding. In order to prevent certain dissenting creditors from commencing enforcement proceedings against the debtor in the UK, the debtor asked the English court to provide an indefinite stay.

In Short

The Situation:  A draft law designed to substantially reform the Belgian Companies Code was submitted to the Belgian Parliament for review ("New Companies Code") on June 4, 2018.

The Result: The New Companies Code will lift a number of mandatory rules applicable to convertible bonds and to the general assembly of bondholders.

In Antone Corp. v. Haggen Holdings, LLC (In re Haggen Holdings, LLC), 2017 WL 3730527 (D. Del. Aug. 30, 2017), the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware considered whether, as part of a bankruptcy asset sale, a chapter 11 debtor could assume and assign a nonresidential real property lease without giving effect to a clause in the lease requiring the debtor to share 50 percent of any net profits realized upon assignment.

The ability to avoid fraudulent or preferential transfers is a fundamental part of U.S. bankruptcy law. However, when a transfer by a U.S. entity takes place outside the U.S. to a non-U.S. transferee—as is increasingly common in the global economy—courts disagree as to whether the Bankruptcy Code’s avoidance provisions apply extraterritorially to avoid the transfer and recover the transferred assets. A pair of bankruptcy court rulings handed down in 2017 widened a rift among the courts on this issue.

In Short

The Situation: Belgium has introduced senior non-preferred notes, a new category of debt securities available to banking institutions.

The Result: In the event of a liquidation, senior non-preferred notes will rank ahead of subordinated notes, but behind "ordinary" senior preferred notes and any claims benefiting from legal or statutory preferences.

Chapter 15 of the Bankruptcy Code offers an effective mechanism for U.S. courts to provide assistance to non-U.S. courts presiding over the insolvency proceedings of foreign debtors with assets located in the U.S. An important feature of chapter 15 is "comity," the deference that U.S. courts give to the decisions of foreign courts under appropriate circumstances. A ruling recently handed down by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit illustrates that, although comity is an integral part of chapter 15, this chapter is far from the only context in which it applies.

With one exception, the Top 10 List of "public company" (defined as a company with publicly traded stock or debt) bankruptcies of 2016 consisted entirely of energy companies—solar, coal, and oil and gas producers—reflecting, as in 2015, the dire straits of those sectors caused by weakened worldwide demand and, until their December turnaround, plummeting oil prices. The exception came from the airline industry. Each company gracing the Top 10 List for 2016 entered bankruptcy with assets valued at more than $3 billion.

The U.S. Supreme Court has handed down two rulings thus far in 2016 (October 2015 Term) involving issues of bankruptcy law. In the first, Husky Int’l Elecs., Inc. v. Ritz, 194 L. Ed. 2d 655, 2016 BL 154812 (2016), the Court addressed the scope of section 523(a)(2)(A) of the Bankruptcy Code, which bars the discharge of any debt of an individual debtor for money, property, services, or credit to the extent obtained by "false pretenses, a false representation, or actual fraud, other than a statement respecting the debtor’s or an insider’s financial condition."

On April 7, 2016, Quicksilver Resources Inc. ("Quicksilver") announced that it closed the sale of its U.S. assets for $245 million to BlueStone Natural Resources II ("BlueStone") in connection with Quicksilver's bankruptcy cases and pursuant to an Asset Purchase Agreement that was approved by Judge Laurie Selber Silverstein of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware in January 2016.

Although most western legal systems have recognised for some decades the public benefit in rehabilitating failed enterprises, some countries do it better than others. To some extent, this is because of differences in local legislation (sometimes small, but with far-reaching effects), which either shapes, or is shaped by, popular or political attitudes to business failure.