In a judgment issued on 15 December in the English High Court (Lehman Brothers International (Europe)(in administration) v CRC Credit Fund Limited & Ors [2009] EWHC 3228), and based on assumed facts presented to him, Mr Justice Briggs described the failure by LBIE to protect client monies from the impact of insolvency as "truly spectacular" and involving "shocking underperformance".

Following up on our previous blog on Lord Glennie's controversial decision in the Scottish Lion solvent scheme of arrangement we can now report that last week the scheme was formally dismissed.

In a judgment handed down last week, the Court of Appeal upheld the decision of Mr Justice Blackburne (previously reported here) that the English courts have no jurisdiction to sanction the proposed scheme of arrangement for Lehman Brothers International Europe (LBIE) insofar as it purports to extinguish rights of beneficiaries under trusts.

The administrators of Lehman Brothers International (Europe) have been intending to propose a scheme of arrangement under the English Companies Act to enable them to distribute several billions of dollars of assets held on trust by the company in the face of difficulties in establishing who was entitled to the trust assets; in particular, they had not received responses from all potentially interested clients, could not rely on the accuracy of the company's records and had not received all the information requested from sub-custodians and other intermediaries.

InDornoch Ltd & Ors v Westminster International & Ors [2009] EWHC 1782 (Admiralty) Mr Justice Tomlinson held that the sale by Westminster International (Westminster) of the wreck of a vessel, the Fariway for the sum of 1000 Euros to a related company was a transaction at an undervalue under s423 of the Insolvency Act 1986 (which, in basic terms, provides that certain disposals made to connected persons for a value less than a fair value may be set aside by the court).

In Josef Syska (Administrator of Elektrim SA (in bankruptcy) and Elektrim SA (in bankruptcy) v Vivendi Universal SA & Others [2009] EWCA Civ 677 the main question to be decided by the Court of Appeal was whether, when an arbitration is proceeding in one Member State of the European Union, in this case the UK, and one of the parties to the arbitration becomes insolvent in another Member State, in this case Poland, the consequences of that insolvency, in so far as they affect the arbitration, are to be determined by the law of the Member State where the insolvency procee

In (1) James Robert Tucker (2) Jeremy Spratt (Joint Supervisors of Energy Holdings (No 3)(in liquidation) v Gold Fields Mining LLC [2009] EWCA Civ 173 the Joint Supervisors (JS) of a Company Voluntary Arrangement (CVA) appealed against a decision that they had wrongly excluded a claim form on the grounds that it had been out of time.

The FSMT has handed down its decision in the case of Asgar Ali Ravjani (trading as Astrad Finance) v Financial Services Authority, which involved the failure to disclose a discharged bankruptcy to the FSA.

The English Court has ordered that meetings be convened on 4 July 2008 for creditors to vote on the solvent schemes of arrangement being proposed by 82 members of the E W Payne Pools. The E W Payne Pools have been in run-off for over 20 years and, it is predicted, that the run-off could last, if not for the proposed schemes, for at least another 20 years. The purpose of the schemes is to bring that run-off to an early close. The schemes establish a method for the valuation and payment of cedants' current and future claims against the Pools.

The case of Law Society v Dixit Shah (2007) EWHC 2841 (Ch) arose from the intervention of the Office for the Supervision of Solicitors into an association of firms owned by Dixit Shah which traded under "the BJ Brandon Group" name. The Law Society alleged that the OSS discovered that around £12.5 million of client money had been misappropriated by Mr Shah.