Winter is here, with the attendant risk of another major weather event impacting the energy production industry, and, specifically, the wind power generation industry in Texas. Last year, Winter Storm Uri significantly disrupted the Texas power grid and forced several energy originators, distributors, and buyers to consider restructuring alternatives.

In the wake of the global financial crisis in 2007-08, distressed real estate yielded generous returns to investors that managed to pick the right cherries at the right times.

The rapidly changing impact of COVID-19 on companies and the wider economy presents directors with the unenviable task of balancing the immediate need to secure the survival of their company against the longer-term implications for their stakeholders. In March, the UK Government announced that wrongful trading measures would be temporarily suspended to ease this pressure. The suspension measures are included in the Corporate Insolvency and Governance Act 2020, which introduces both temporary measures, such as this, and permanent and significant changes to UK insolvency law.

An important decision[1] has been handed down by the High Court of Australia which relates to the order of payment of statutorily preferred debts out of trust property held by an insolvent corporate trustee.

Cross-border insolvency of multinational groups

WGV aims to agree a set of key principles and draft text for a regime to address crossborder insolvency in the context of enterprise groups (defined widely to mean any entity, regardless of its legal form, that is engaged in economic activities and may be governed by insolvency law). This has started to take a form most suited to a stand-alone supplement to the Model Law. The Group’s secretariat produced a draft legislative text, incorporating three principles agreed by WGV. The three principles are:

Az Európai Unió Bírósága közzétett végzésében megerősítette a korábbi gyakorlatát a székhelyét más államba áthelyező társaság fizetésképtelensége esetén irányadó joghatósági szabályokkal kapcsolatban. Bejegyzésünkben röviden áttekintjük az irányadó esetjogot, és azt, hogy ebben milyen változást fog hozni a 2017-től alkalmazandó új uniós jogszabály.

Following a lengthy process which started in 2012 aiming to reform the Romanian insolvency framework as part of a wider judicial reformation program, the New Insolvency Law (Law no. 85/2014 regarding the prevention of insolvency and the insolvency proceedings) entered into force on 28 July 2014.

Since Nortel Networks Corporation and a number of related companies (together, “Nortel”), initiated a reorganization under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act (“CCAA”) over two years ago, the Ontario Ministry of the Environment (the “MOE”) has sought to hold Nortel responsible to remediate environmental contamination remaining on properties once or currently owned by Nortel. Nortel has maintained that its responsibility for the environmental contamination should not be prioritized ahead of its other obligations.

A Chapter 11 corporate debtor’s monetary penalty obligation owed to the Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”), resulting from “fraud on consumers,” survived the debtor’s reorganization plan discharge, even when the FCC “was not a victim of the fraud,” held the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on Sept. 2, 2021. In re Fusion Connect Inc., 2021 WL 3932346, *1 (S.D.N.Y. Sept. 2, 2021).

A creditor’s “later-in-time reclamation demand is ‘subject to’ [a lender’s] prior rights as a secured creditor,” held the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit on Feb. 11, 2020. In re HHGregg, Inc., 2020 WL 628268 (7th Cir. Feb. 11, 2020). And “[w]hen a lender insists on collateral, it expects the collateral to be worth something,” said the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit on Feb. 11, 2020, when rejecting a guarantor’s “novel reading” of his security agreement. In re Somerset Regional Water Resources, LLC, 2020 WL 628542 (3d Cir. Feb. 11, 2020).