Statutory Demands pursuant to the Corporations Act are a mechanism available to creditors for the payment of debt. Upon the expiry of a Statutory Demand, the Corporations Act presumes that the company is insolvent and allows the entity making the demand to apply to the court for their winding up on grounds of insolvency.
The Government has passed amendments to the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth) and the Corporations Regulations 2001 (Regulations) to overturn the impact of the decision in Sons of Gwalia v Margaretic (2007) 231 CLR 160 (Sons of Gwalia) and reinstate the longheld convention that creditors’ rights take precedence over shareholders’ rights in the instance of a winding up.
What was the outcome of Sons of Gwalia?
Your insurer goes bust – can you as an insured claim the reinsurance proceeds? An important decision in the NSW Supreme Court gives useful guidance on when a court will allow departures from the statutory scheme controlling the application of reinsurance proceeds (Amaca Pty Ltd v McGrath & Anor as liquidators of HIH Underwriting and Insurance (Australia) Pty Ltd [2011] NSWSC 90).
The insurer goes broke, and there are all these claimants at the door…
Law clerk, Myles Engelen, discusses the decision of the Supreme Court of New South Wales, in McGrath & Anor re HIH Insurance Ltd approving a proposal to use excess assets of some members of the group to fund claims by the group members.
Key Points: An administrator of a deed of company arrangement has been allowed to sell the company over a shareholder's objections.
The GFC has seen a significant rise in the number of corporate insolvencies.[1]
Many of those insolvencies have been the result of tighter credit, rather than a collapse of the company's business. It's no surprise, therefore, that there is a major appetite for the acquisition of distressed businesses and companies.
Key Points: All companies, regardless of their size or solvency, must ensure that they have appropriate systems for dealing with statutory demands.
In my last article, I looked at the use of statutory demands. Time now to go through the looking glass and examine the impact of demands on the companies which receive them.
First, a brief recap …
The Government has reintroduced the Corporations Amendment (Sons of Gwalia) Bill 2010 into Parliament to give effect to the Government's decision to reverse the High Court's decision in Sons of Gwalia v Margaretic.
The law of "shadow directors" means that a person who effectively controls a board of a company, even though that person is not a director, may find himself being legally classified as a director of the company. That carries with it the threat of legal liability for the company's insolvent trading debts in the event that the company goes into liquidation.
As foreshadowed earlier this year, on 2 June 2010 the Minister for Financial Services, Superannuation and Corporate Law, Chris Bowen MP introduced the Corporations Amendment (Sons of Gwalia) Bill 2010. Associate, Justin Le Blond summarises the Bill.
The proposed amendments in the Bill will return the order of claims in a corporate winding-up to the situation that was commonly understood to exist prior to the Sons of Gwalia judgment. That is, priority will be given to creditors ahead of shareholders in granting access to the equity of an insolvent company.