On October 10, 2019, the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Ohio (OHSB) entered General Order 30-2 implementing Complex Chapter 11 procedures. Under General Order 30-2, a case is eligible to be a complex case if (1) it is filed under Chapter 11 of the Code; (2) it is not filed by an individual debtor, as a single asset real estate case, or as a small business case as defined in § 101(51C) of the Code; and (3) the debt of the debtor or the aggregate debt of all affiliated debtors is at least $10 million or it involves a debtor with publicly traded debt or equity.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit recently affirmed in part and reversed in part a trial court’s judgment against a debtor who filed an adversary proceeding alleging that a creditor and its counsel violated the bankruptcy discharge by trying to collect a discharged debt, holding that the attorney could not be held in contempt because he lacked knowledge of the discharge, but the creditor could be held liable for the actions of its counsel under agency law.
Judge Martin Glenn last week issued a decision in two related chapter 15 cases, In re Foreign Econ. Indus. Bank Ltd. “Vneshprombank” Ltd., No. 16-13534, and In re Larisa Markus, No. 19-10096, 2019 Bankr. LEXIS 3203 (Bankr. S.D.N.Y. Oct. 8, 2019). The decision is chock full of case citations and offers a tutorial on chapter 15.
Breaking from the overwhelming majority of prior case law, two bankruptcy courts recently held that Medicare and Medicaid provider agreements can be assigned as part of a Section 363 bankruptcy sale free and clear of the assignor’s liabilities under the provider agreements.
On October 8, after two days of hearings, the judge overseeing the Sears Holdings Corp., et al. bankruptcy cases orally confirmed their joint plan even though he acknowledged that the Sears estates currently do not have enough money to fund it. How does Sears expect to fund its plan and pay its suppliers? By filing approximately 2,000 preference lawsuits to recover some of the estimated $1.345 billion the Sears debtors paid out prior to filing their bankruptcy petitions.
On October 15, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York held that the NCUA may substitute a new plaintiff to represent the agency’s claims in a residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS) action against an international bank serving as an RMBS trustee.
The oil and gas industry in the United States is highly dependent upon an intricate set of agreements that allow oil and gas to be gathered from privately owned land. Historically, the dedication language in oil and gas gathering agreements — through which the rights to the oil or gas in specified land are dedicated — was viewed as being a covenant that ran with the land. That view was put to the test during the wave of oil and gas exploration company bankruptcies that began in 2014.
In In re Energy Future Holdings Corp., 2019 WL 2535700 (3d Cir. June 19, 2019), a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruled that adequate protection payments made during a bankruptcy case and distributions under a chapter 11 plan are not distributions of collateral for purposes of a "waterfall" provision in an intercreditor agreement.
Intercreditor and Subordination Agreements
Small Business Reorganization Act of 2019
In In re Fortin, 598 B.R. 689 (Bankr. D. Mass. 2019), the United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Massachusetts considered whether a lender may enforce a mortgage despite the unenforceability of the underlying promissory note. The court held that a lender’s inability to collect on a note due to the expiration of the statute of limitation for enforcement of the note does not adversely affect enforcement of the mortgage so long as the debt remains unpaid.