Administrations, including "pre-packs", are not capable of constituting "insolvency proceedings...instituted with a view to the liquidation of the assets of the transferor" within the meaning of Regulation 8(7) of TUPE. Where there is a sale of an undertaking by an administrator, the employees assigned to the undertaking will automatically transfer to the buyer and receive unfair dismissal protection.

Key facts

The penultimate year in the first decade of the second millennium was one for the ages, or at least most people hope so.

For the third time in as many years, the Delaware Chancery Court has handed down an important ruling interpreting the interaction between federal bankruptcy law and Delaware corporate law. The thorny question this time was whether a bankruptcy court’s determination that the directors of a corporation acted in good faith when they authorized a chapter 11 filing precluded a subsequent claim that the directors breached their fiduciary duties by doing so. The Delaware Chancery Court concluded that it did, ruling in Nelson v.

Recently, in Travelers Casualty & Surety Co. of America v. Pacific Gas & Electric Co., the U.S. Supreme Court resolved a conflict among the circuit courts of appeal by overruling the Ninth Circuit’s Fobian rule, which dictated that attorneys’ fees are not recoverable in bankruptcy for litigating issues “peculiar to federal bankruptcy law.” In reaching its decision, the Supreme Court reasoned that the Fobian rule’s limitations on attorneys’ fees find no support in either section 502 of the Bankruptcy Code or elsewhere.

A debtor’s exclusive right to formulate and solicit acceptances for a plan of reorganization during the initial stages of a chapter 11 case is one of the most important benefits conferred under the Bankruptcy Code as a means of facilitating the successful restructuring of an ailing enterprise. By giving a chapter 11 debtor-in-possession time to devise a solution to balance sheet and operational problems without being burdened by the competing agendas of other stakeholders in the bankruptcy case, exclusivity levels the playing field, at least temporarily.

It is broadly accepted that the abbreviated deadline for a bankruptcy trustee or chapter 11 debtor-in-possession ("DIP") to assume or reject an unexpired lease of nonresidential real property with respect to which the debtor is the lessee does not apply to executory contracts or unexpired leases of residential real property or personal property.

Section 553 of the Bankruptcy Code provides, subject to certain exceptions, that the Bankruptcy Code “does not affect any right of a creditor to offset a mutual debt owing by such creditor to the debtor that arose before the commencement of the case under this title against a claim of such creditor against the debtor that arose before the commencement of the case.” Debts are considered “mutual” when they are due to and from the same persons or entities in the same capacity.

October 17, 2013, will mark the eighth anniversary of the enactment of chapter 15 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code as part of the comprehensive U.S. bankruptcy-law reforms implemented in 2005. Chapter 15, which governs cross-border bankruptcy and insolvency cases, is patterned after the Model Law on Cross-Border Insolvency (the “Model Law”), a framework of legal principles formulated by the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (“UNCITRAL”) in 1997 to deal with the rapidly expanding volume of international insolvency cases.

Global—On 26 October 2012, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in a ruling that may impact sovereign debt restructurings, upheld a lower court order enjoining Argentina from making payments on restructured defaulted debt without making comparable payments to bondholders who did not participate in the restructuring.

In In re River East Plaza, LLC, 669 F.3d 826 (7th Cir. 2012), the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a bankruptcy court's ruling that a debtor could not "cram down" a chapter 11 plan over the objection of an undersecured creditor which had made a section 1111(b) election by substituting a lien on 30-year U.S. Treasury bonds as the "indubitable equivalent" of the creditor's mortgage lien on the property.