The Bankruptcy Code provides the debtor or trustee with a variety of tools to augment the estate through avoidance and recovery actions.This paper will address recent cases of interest involving fraudulent transfers within the 10th Circuit and in other jurisdictions.
On December 4, 2012, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit added to the growing body of case law delineating the extent of bankruptcy courts’ jurisdiction in the wake the Supreme Court’s decision in Stern v. Marshall.
Introduction
On January 17, 2013, the United States Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York decided that American Airlines (American) was not obligated to pay certain make-whole premiums set forth in some of its loan indentures at the time that American refinanced the applicable loans. A makewhole premium typically allows a lender to be compensated for having to reinvest in a lower interestrate environment when a borrower prepays its debt before the original maturity date.
The New Year seems to be starting with a bang for the ILS industry. On January 23rd, KKR announced it had taken a 24.9% stake in Nephila. Earlier in the month Validus reported a $400 million capital raise to fund investments in collateralized reinsurance and ILS. In a transaction on which Edwards Wildman Palmer LLP advised Transatlantic Re, Transatlantic Re in December acquired a minority interest in Pillar Capital Management and announced a strategic partnership with Pillar, a manager of funds investing in collateralized reinsurance and ILS.
- On January 22, 2013, following a 10-day bench trial, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas agreed with Verizon that its former subsidiary, Idearc, Inc., was not insolvent on November 17, 2006, the day Verizon spun it off to become a separate entity. The plaintiff – the litigation trustee of the Idearc bankruptcy estate – brought this case claiming that Verizon spun Idearc off to bury its unprofitable Yellow Pages business unit and thereby take the losses of that unit off Verizon’s books.
Bankers and their counsel should note that during its December lame-duck session, the Ohio General Assembly passed the Ohio Legacy Trust Act (Am. Sub. H.B. 479), which will go into effect March 27, 2013. The Act creates borrower-friendly provisions prohibiting the use of so-called “Cherryland” insolvency carve-outs in nonrecourse loan documents which will be of interest to all financial institutions engaged in commercial lending in Ohio.
On January 17, 2013, in a lengthy and closely reasoned opinion,1 Judge Sean Lane of the Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York authorized American Airlines, Inc. (“American”) to repay $1.3 billion in debt without payment of a make-whole premium over the objection of U.S.
The United States Bankruptcy Court for the Eastern District of New York held that it had subject matter jurisdiction over a bankruptcy trustee’s adversary proceeding against the bankrupt entity’s insurer because the policy and policy proceeds were part of the policyholder’s bankruptcy estate. EMS Financial Services, LLC. v. Federal Ins. Co., 2013 WL 64755 (Bankr. E.D.N.Y. Jan. 4, 2013).
Introduction