Can a senior secured creditor, who credit bid for substantially all of a debtor’s assets, contribute non-estate property to a litigation trust for the benefit of general unsecured creditors without following the absolute priority rule?  In the recent Constellation Enterprises case, the Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware ruled that, as a result of the Supreme Court’s Jevic decision, it cannot and on that basis refused to approve a settlement which would have provided…

You may have noticed from the emails flooding into your inbox (even in this post-GDPR world) that this Friday 23 November is “Black Friday”. The event, originating in the US, takes place the day after Thanksgiving and is now synonymous with heavy discounting by retailers, especially those online. Less than a decade ago, this would have been an utterly unremarkable shopping day in the UK. The UK’s shoppers understood that, whilst the retailers were fiercely…

In prior posts, we discussed the perplexing issue of how and whether a trademark licensee is protected when the trademark owner/licensor files a bankruptcy petition and moves to reject the trademark license in accordance with section 365 of the Bankruptcy Code. In January of this year, the First Circuit Court of Appeals issued its ruling in Mission Product Holdings, Inc. v. Tempnology, LLC, 879 F.3d 389 (2018), holding that a trademark licensee was not…

Following the Enterprise Act 2002, the preferential status which HMRC had enjoyed in an insolvency was abolished, rendering HMRC the same as any other unsecured creditor. The effect of this was to swell the pot of assets available to be applied to all unsecured creditor claims. Philip Hammond announced in Monday’s budget that HMRC’s preferential status is to be restored. What does this mean for HMRC and unsecured creditors?…

In their article published by the IBA Insolvency and Restructuring International Magazine titled “Russia: Cryptocurrency and Bankruptcy Estate”, Sergey Treshchev and Elena Malevich of Squire Patton Boggs, Moscow analyse recent decisions in the Russian courts considering whether cryptocurrencies are an asset which form part of the bankruptcy estate. Given the speed at which cryptocurrency has grown as a concept, it is of no surprise that bankruptcy and insolvency legislation has yet to catch up and…

No one knows for certain what the future will hold for the UK and the remaining EU countries post 29 March 2019 but in the context of cross-border insolvency we do know that if there is a no-deal Brexit, that the Recast Regulation on Insolvency Regulation (EU) 2015/848 will be repealed. So, what does this mean for UK insolvencies with a cross-border element? In simple terms a UK appointment taker will have to apply to the…

Paul Muscutt, London restructuring partner at law firm Squire Patton Boggs, talks to Andrew Tate, former R3 President, Chair of R3’s Policy Group and Partner at accountancy firm Kreston Reeves LLP, about conflicts of interest in the restructuring and insolvency profession*.…