The continued modernisation of the French economy has been a long and difficult process but, as a former British prime minister was fond of saying, “there is no alternative”.
A scandal in the world of letters and old manuscripts would not have gone unnoticed and the French case of Aristophil has lead to extensive press coverage; a massive fraud is suspected with thousands of works and hundreds of millions of euros at stake.
Click here to read this article in French.
It is now possible for creditors and co-contractors of insolvent companies to take certain steps in French insolvency proceedings and make certain statements “online”.
Published in the middle of August, the 2015-1009 decree of 18 August 2015 could easily have gone unnoticed, if it hadn’t been expected for several months by us “technophile” practitioners.
The Macron law of 7 August 2015, named after the current Minister of the Economy, anticipated the establishment of specialised commercial courts which will process the most complex insolvency proceedings. Currently, any of the 134 French commercial courts can be applied to; the choice being mainly the location of the distressed company’s headquarters. This new arrangement aims to improve efficiency and to increase the number of specialised judges (because in France, commercial judges are lay judges). The aim of the reform is to save jobs.
This quick guide summarises the duties that a managing director of a German GmbH (hereinafter "director") is subject to, and how those duties change when the company is insolvent or at risk of being insolvent.
It also gives an overview of the personal risk to directors when the company is in financial difficulty.
On March 23, 2020, the German Federal Government (Bundesregierung) published a draft bill to mitigate the consequences of the COVID-19 in civil, insolvency and criminal procedural law.
The German Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection is preparing new legislation suspending the obligation to file for insolvency in order to protect companies that encounter financial difficulties due to the coronavirus crisis (see here).
Due to its constitutional and legal system, Germany is different from a number of other countries around the world. Measures fighting the spread of COVID-19 in Germany cannot be taken at the central government level in Berlin (Bundesregierung) but have to be taken by the governments of the 16 states (Landesregierungen), which constitute the Federal Republic of Germany.
However, in recent days the Prime Ministers of the 16 German states have coordinated their action closely with each other and with the central German government.
In Germany, securitization SPVs, factoring companies and asset based lenders take security over the leased assets owned by the leasing company by way of a security transfer of title. However, in all cases of a leasing company’s insolvency where the leasing company has still possession of the assets, the owner of the security in the leased assets was in the past not seen as being entitled to realise the value of the assets itself.
Under German law, there are strict legal obligations for the managing directors of an insolvent company to file for insolvency. Failure to comply exposes a managing director to civil and criminal liability. It is therefore important for managing directors to know how to test whether their company is insolvent. One of the legal reasons for insolvency is illiquidity and the second senate of the German Federal Civil Court (“BGH”) has, in a decision dated 19 December 2017 (II ZR 88/16), clarified a question regarding the illiquidity test.