This case concerned whether a fee payable by a tenant for assigning the lease involved the provision of “credit” for the purposes of the Consumer Credit Act 1974 (CCA).
In the recent case of Bank of Cyprus UK Limited v Menelaou, the Supreme Court showed the flexibility of the equitable remedy of unpaid vendor's lien.
Facts of the case
It was anticipated that more radical thoughts would emerge from Lord Justice Jackson’s latest speech last night to the Insolvency Practitioners’ Association on the subject of rolling out more fixed costs, and so it proved.
In Sharma v Top Brands Ltd [2015] EWCA Civ 1140, the Court of Appeal refused to allow a former liquidator of a company (which was a vehicle for VAT fraud) to rely on the illegality defence to avoid liability for a claim brought against her for breach of duty under section 212 of the Insolvency Act 1986 (IA 1986).
Background
This article takes a look at the considerations laid down in Re Sahaviriya Steel Industries UKLimited [2015] EWHC 2726 when the court is asked to make a validation against anticipated payments – what guidance can be extracted?
As reported in Reed Smith’s March 2015 client alert, insolvency practitioners currently enjoy an exemption from the provisions of Part 2 of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 (LASPO).
The past two months have seen a further plethora of regulatory and legislative changes. We sum up some of the more significant ones.
Pre-pack pool open for business
The last two months have seen two key appeals in which the court was required to decide whether the tenant of a particular type of building should enjoy the statutory right to acquire the freehold of a house. This right is enshrined in the Leasehold Reform Act 1967.
The properties, and the questions for the court in each case, were quite different. What the judgments had in common was a purposive approach to interpretation of the Act.
In 2013 as part of the so called “Jackson reforms” to civil litigation, the ability to recover Conditional Fee Arrangement (“CFA”) success fees and After The Event (“ATE”) insurance premiums from other parties in litigation was removed. Insolvency practitioners bringing claims on behalf of insolvent companies were exempt from the application of these new provisions; however the Ministry of Justice announced in December 2015 that the exemption would be lifted in April 2016.
With the cyclical fluctuation in oil and gas commodity prices, the UKCS has had its fair share of E&P companies going insolvent. As the UKCS matures, the profile of companies that invest in the region is changing. Many smaller parties, potentially with less access to capital, are now building positions. The commercial exposure is that some companies will not be able to meet cash calls, creating headaches for their co-venturers.