As the U.S. economy continues to limp along, six years after the official end of the Great Recession, it has become painfully clear that the world economy is highly interdependent. The ability of any one country to improve its own lot is limited by the conditions in other countries and the actions (or lack of actions) being taken in those countries.
Europe has struggled during the last several years to triage a long series of critical blows to the economies of the 28 countries that comprise the European Union, as well as the collective viability of the 19 eurozone economies. Here we provide a snapshot of some recent changes implemented
Greetings! Welcome to the October newsletter for the International Committee. We trust you will find it informative and useful.
The oil boom is over. This is not an earth-shattering statement, given that we are now nearly a year into the precipitous price collapse of oil, which began in November 2014, with the price for a barrel of WTI crude oil falling from the $100 region to the $40-$50 range recently.
A recent foreign recognition of a bankruptcy proceeding case out of Nova Scotia, Canada, has brought to light the situation where a Canadian company moves to the U.S., seeks protection under chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, and then seeks to impose that stay on creditors from its former home. Not surprisingly, it didn’t get very far with the Canadian court.
An unprecedented filing leads to an unprecedented joint solution from the both the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware and the Ontario Superior Court of Justice -Commercial List supervising the Nortel liquidation in Canada and the U.S.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit recently held that a bankruptcy court must conduct a § 363 review of a chapter 15 debtor’s sale of U.S. assets, even if the sale was previously approved by a foreign court.[1] Although it acknowledged that comity is an important consideration in a chapter 15 proceedings, the Second Circuit determined that § 1520(a)(2)[2] “acts as a brake or limitation on comity” by requiring bankruptcy courts to conduct the § 363[3] review.[4]
The Fall of OGX
Former billionaire Eike Batista’s oil firm OGX filed for bankruptcy protection in late October 2013 after OGX had defaulted on a $45 million bond payment earlier in the month.[1] On October 30th, 2013, OGX Petróleo e Gás Participações S.A. (“OGX Participações”)[2] and OGX Petróleo e Gás S.A. (“OGX Petróleo e Gás”), both Brazilian companies; OGX International GMBH (“OGX International”), an Austrian company; and OGX Austria GMBH (“OGX Austria”), also an Austrian company, filed for reorganization before the Fourth Business Court of Rio de Janeiro (RJ).
Editor's note: Following is an article by Robin Darton of Tanner De Witt (an established, independent Hong Kong law firm), addressing issues in his home venue of Hong Kong. Robin is particularly well suited to the task,having practiced for over 20 years as a solicitor in Hong Kong in litigation and other contentious issues, with an emphasis on contentious insolvency and restructuring matters in the UK, Hong Kong and the Asia region. TAB
On June 6, 2014, the French Constitutional Court (Conseil constitutionnel) ruled on the question of whether a court should be entitled to convert a receivership proceeding into a winding-up proceeding on its own initiative.
