postings by Jason Kilborn

Third-Party Releases Clearly Endorsed in the 2nd Circuit, At Long Last

posted by Jason Kilborn

Yesterday's 2nd Circuit opinion reconfirming Purdue Pharma's settlement/restructuring plan is an enlightening read for those interested in third-party releases. In what seems to me (and the concurrence) a bit of a reach, the 2nd Circuit conceded that statutory authority more specific than section 105 was needed to support third-party releases, but the Court found such support in section 1123(b)(6): “a plan may . . . include any other appropriate provision not inconsistent with the applicable provisions of this title.” Hmmm. That's quite a slender reed on which to balance such a powerful action. More interesting, the Court set forth a series of seven tests to gauge whether any given third-party release is appropriate. One key test is rather vague (whether the plan provides for the fair payment of enjoined claims), but at least we now have a roadmap for getting to an effective third-party release. Or do we? The Court in a crucial passage emphasizes "to the extent that there is a fear that this opinion could be read as a blueprint for how individuals can obtain third-party releases in the face of a tsunami of litigation, we caution that the key fact regarding the indemnity agreements at issue is that they were entered into by the end of 2004—well before the contemplation of bankruptcy." So the type of pre-bankruptcy planning we've seen in other cases may be a bridge too far, at least in the 2nd Circuit. This latest opinion seems to add weight to recent arguments that bankruptcy court is, indeed, an appropriate and effective venue for resolving sticky mass-tort issues, though the policy debate will doubtless continue.

New Year, New Personal Bankruptcy Law--in Kazakhstan

posted by Jason Kilborn

The list of countries with new personal insolvency laws continues to grow. Bloomberg noted today that the President of Kazakhstan had signed a new law setting out several procedures for relieving the debts of non-entrepreneur individuals (sole proprietors remain relegated to the existing law on rehabilitation and bankruptcy). The text of this 30 December 2022 law is here (in Russian only), and most of its provisions will become effective in 60 days, around March 1, 2023. 

The structure of this law and its four pathways to relief are clearly inspired by the 2015 law of Kazakhstan's northern neighbor. This indicates a continuing trend, as new personal insolvency laws are generally based on a model from the law of a country the adopting country respects, and the model in this case is a fairly good one (the parent law is described here and here). The Kazakh law differs in some respects from this predecessor model, but the basic system is the same: (1) a no-asset procedure ("out-of-court bankruptcy") providing a simple discharge to debtors with debt below about $11,000 (i.e., 1600 "monthly calculation units," which for 2022 was KZ₸3063, just over US$7, so 1600 x $7 = $11,200), (2) a 5-year payment-plan procedure ("restoration of solvency") for debtors with regular income who choose to propose a 5-year plan for court (not creditor) approval, (3) a traditional liquidation-and-discharge procedure ("judicial bankruptcy") unfolding over six months and leaving the debtor with exempt property, including a sole residence, and (4) a settlement option ("amicable agreement") for debtors who manage to convince their creditors to agree to a private compromise (read: never!).

While the requirements for accessing the no-asset out-of-court bankruptcy procedure seem wildly unrealistic and uniquely austere (no property of any kind!?), the new Kazakh system is fairly well structured. Judging by the northern neighbor's recent experience with its very similar set of procedures, it seems most likely the payment-plan procedure will be selected by very few debtors, and the courts will reject the unviable plans of the few debtors who try to pursue this route. Judicial bankruptcy will become the main pathway to relief, which seems to be within reach for ordinary Kazakh citizens. Eventually, the extremely restrictive access requirements for out-of-court no-asset bankruptcy seem likely to be relaxed--either in practice or in a first round of law reform--and that procedure will become the workhorse for the personal bankruptcy system.

Yet another laboratory to observe the effects of the messy compromises that create personal insolvency procedures--and thank goodness, yet another large population of debtors who finally have access to legal relief from debts that would otherwise hound them and their families forever, with no hope of recovery. The new year brings new hope for such families in Kazakhstan!

The decline and fall of commercial law

posted by Jason Kilborn

A listserv post this morning accentuated a troubling trend at the intersection of commercial law and bankruptcy practice: a marked decline in confident expertise in the former.

The scenario is simple and, I suspect, common: perfected security interest in collateral (say, a car), collateral destroyed (either before or after bankruptcy filing), insurance company sends check to bankruptcy trustee rather than to the debtor or secured creditor. Trustee then claims the insurance check is not subject to the security interest, which understandably takes the secured creditor's lawyer quite by unpleasant surprise. Is this check not obviously "substitute collateral" for the destroyed original collateral (the car), s/he asks?

Well, yes, but ... neither the trustee nor a judge is likely to accept the creditor's lawyer's correct answer without some compelling analysis as to why; that is, citation to governing law (i.e., statutory authority). The challenge, which I emphasize to my Secured Transactions students every year, is that the security agreement is unlikely to resolve this. Only a lawyer who is very familiar with secured transactions law could possibly know how this answer gets worked out (regardless of what the security agreement says or does not say about insurance "proceeds"). Analysis below the fold (you know you can't resist!) ...  

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Bye, Bye, ABI

posted by Jason Kilborn

I have been an American Bankruptcy Institute member since June 1999, but I have finally made the difficult decision to allow my membership to lapse after 22 years at the end of next month. 

I've been thinking about this for some time. Academic friends had been suggesting to me for years that they were uncomfortable with some of ABI's practices, and I was shocked when ABI sharply raised my membership dues for the first time in two decades a few years ago. I've been thinking since then about the value proposition of my membership, and I had begun to notice that I seemed to be getting very little value for my increased dues ... and then I received the first of several renewal notice emails.

When I reviewed the renewal webpage, I recalled my friends' concerns about ABI's objectionable practices as I saw what seemed to me to be a troublesome new practice. For years, I have simply renewed and paid electronically, with no "gotcha" commitments. This year, for the first time, I noticed that I had to select a box indicating that I agreed to have my membership auto-renewed and my credit card auto-charged for future dues. Perhaps it's irrational, but this really stuck in my craw. I envisioned one of those misleading commercials for leggings or bamboo socks that suck you into an auto-renewal scheme, and more importantly, I recalled the FTC's concerns about the abusive auto-renewal trend that seems to have popped up in recent years. States have begun to pass anti-auto-renewal laws to curb this abusive practice. I understand, of course, that auto-renewal is convenient and desirable for many people, and the checkbox on ABI's renewal page would be unobjectionable if it were optional. But forcing members to "agree"--again, for the first time ever--to auto-renew and auto-pay in the following years (or navigate back into the electronic membership labyrinth and manage to figure out how to cancel this auto-renewal in time to avoid it) is a shocking practice for an organization that purports to stand for (among other things) protecting consumers. Unseemly at the very least.

Continue reading "Bye, Bye, ABI" »

Annotated Bibliography of Histories of Debt and Bankruptcy

posted by Jason Kilborn

I just read a really fabulous annotated bibliography of books (alas, articles by such luminaries as Emily Kadens are excluded) on the history of credit, debt, and bankruptcy in the United States. Many of my favorites are on here, along with a few new entrants with which I was, embarrassingly, unfamiliar. This is a great resource for new lawyers and law professors, in particular, but also for anyone interested in this fascinating history and/or looking for something to help while away the cold, blizzard-bound winter hours. Enjoy! 

Contract Ambiguity: Paying Versus Still Owing a Debt

posted by Jason Kilborn

I've been meaning for some time to tell this brain-candy story involving an amazing ambiguity in a Chinese debt-related contract. Now that my career-first research semester is drawing to a close and the holiday break is upon us, I thought now's the time to tell it.

To set up the story, the equivalent of the legal-cultural Latin phrase pacta sunt servanda (debts are to be paid) in Chinese is 欠债还钱 (qiàn zhài huán qián) [the phrase continues, but this is the key bit]. It means "If you owe a debt, return the money." Here's where the craziness comes in: Most Chinese characters have one and only one single-syllable pronunciation. That syllable might have many diverse meanings, but how that character sounds is consistent.

Not so with the key character in the above phrase. The character 还 can convey the sound huán, in which case it means "return," or more frequently, it carries the sound hái, which means "still" (that is, carrying on, as in "I still love him despite his sometimes beastly behavior").

Continue reading "Contract Ambiguity: Paying Versus Still Owing a Debt" »

SBRA technical amendment = technical foul?

posted by Jason Kilborn

A great Arabic folk idiom describes an all-too-common occurrence: Literally, "he came to apply eye liner to her, but blinded her." [اجا يكحلها عماها  izha ikaHil-ha, cama-ha] In other words, someone attempted to improve a situation but ended up ruining it. I believe I've encountered an example in the "technical amendment" made by the CARES Act to the Small Business Reorganization Act of 2019.

As Bob pointed out almost exactly two years ago, the original SBRA definition of a "small business debtor" was designed to keep out large public companies and their subsidiaries, but the language was ... inelegant. The first of two subsections (laid out in Bob's post) excluded companies subject to reporting requirements under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (that is, a company with shares widely held by "the public," as defined by the SEC), while an immediately following exclusion applied to such a company that was an affiliate of a debtor (that is, another company already in bankruptcy). Well, whether you're an affiliate of a debtor or not, if you try to file under subchapter V, and you're subject to the '34 Act reporting requirements, you're excluded by the first subsection, so isn't this second provision redundant?

Yes, but ... in 2020, the CARES Act came to put eye liner on this section and blinded it. Rather than fixing this by saying what seems to have been the intention--that an affiliate of a public reporting company cannot file under subchapter V--instead, a "technical amendment" changed the final provision entirely by simply excluding an affiliate of an "issuer, as defined in section 3 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934." [the same language was inserted in both sections 101(51D)(B)(iii) and 1182, so this change is not temporary]

The problem, it seems to me, is that the definition of "issuer" in the '34 Act includes far more than a big, public reporting company--it includes any company that issues so many as one share of stock (or other "security"). The '34 Act is generally about trading of public securities, but that's not the only thing it's about, and the definition of "issuer" in the '34 Act is simply reproduced from the '33 Act, with far broader application.

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Personal Insolvency in Asia and Currency Comparison

posted by Jason Kilborn

While Shenzhen has gotten all the good press since its March launch of the first personal bankruptcy regime in Mainland China, a number of other Asian regimes have also been on the move. I recently examined the rapidly developing personal insolvency system in Singapore, and others have done great work on the unique processes in Japan and Korea. As an outsider, I struggle to capture the real feeling of life under these procedures. The challenge is expressed brilliantly by my favorite article on the difficulty of examining legal phenomena that are utterly foreign to the examiner, a paper that sought to answer the question "what was it like to try a rat?" This struggle is particularly acute in a new paper I've just posted on the fascinating evolution of Shenzhen's new law from its roots in a little-known 2008 consumer insolvency law in Taiwan. The Taiwan law is still in effect, of course (as amended in important respects), and the rocky experience of its first decade offers important lessons for personal insolvency policymakers in Asia and beyond. In both Taiwan and Shenzhen, a potential continuing challenge that intrigues me is among the most important and impactful in any such law--the measure of "necessary" household expenses to be budgeted to debtors for the purgatory period of three years (in Taiwan, it's six!) preceding a discharge. Both Taiwan and Shenzhen chose the social assistance minimum income; basically, the poverty level. Taiwan recently increased this by 20% after years of criticism of forcing bankrupt debtors into the extreme austerity of living within these tight budgets. Shenzhen has decided not to go beyond the poverty level, at least for now.

Expressing the strictures of these poverty levels in useful comparative terms is really difficult for me. Official exchange rates are quite misleading when the question is "what is it like to try to make do on X [local currency units] for three years in [X country]?" Purchasing power parity exchange rates likely get closer to the mark, but with China, I'm not even sure that approach captures the pain (or ease) that debtors in the "discharge examination period" must endure. The figures I'm wrestling with are 1950 yuan in Shenzhen and about 18,000 new Taiwan dollars (15,000 x 1.2) in Taipei (less in the outlying areas). I vaguely understand these to correspond to about US$465 and US$600, respectively, per month, but this just seems untenable to me. How could anyone survive on these amounts for 36 months in Shenzhen or 72 months in Taipei? Granted, both sets of figures are per person, so a debtor caring for parents and/or children might end up with several multiples of these figures per month, but even then, supporting a family of four on US$1860 per month for three years in a major city like Shenzhen still strikes me as so austere as to dissuade people from seeking relief. Am I just out of touch with the reality of modern financial struggles generally (I know some low-income Americans also strain to make ends meet on somewhat similar budgets), or am I not understanding something about life in big-city China, or are the figures just not reflecting the feeling of life within these limits? Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

Book Rec: Range (or Yet Another Paean to Learning from Failure)

posted by Jason Kilborn

With summer upon us, I thought others might be searching for good new reading, as I was when I took up a smart friend's longtime recommendation to read Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. So much good stuff in here. Perhaps contrary to the topic of the book, my brain is constantly in "insolvency policy" mode, so I was particularly interested in the many passages about famous people's meandering struggles to find their passion that catapulted them to success.

Among my favorites was a description of Nike co-founder Phil Knight's entrepreneurship philosophy: [155] "his main goal for his nascent shoe company was to fail fast enough that he could apply what he was learning to his next venture. He made one short-term pivot after another, applying the lessons as he went." This is exactly the advice offered to country after country hoping to develop more effective SME-friendly bankruptcy regimes ... as they unfortunately continue to stick to Old English draconian policies of imposing various restrictions and disabilities on post-bankruptcy entrepreneurs. Range offers yet another extended analysis of why this mindset is so persistent and so counterproductive. We need to let people fail, learn from whatever caused that failure (either mistakes or general economic volatility ... or COVID) and get back on their feet quickly to move on to other ventures.

Continue reading "Book Rec: Range (or Yet Another Paean to Learning from Failure)" »

Human Rights Watch on Imprisonment for Debt

posted by Jason Kilborn

What happens in countries where no consumer bankruptcy regime exists as a safety valve to assuage the worst consequences of unpayable debt? A report this week from Human Rights Watch ("We Lost Everything": Debt Imprisonment in Jordan) offers one heart-wrenching answer. The following excerpt captures the essence:

Jordan is one of the few countries in the world that still allows debt imprisonment. Failure to repay even small debts is a crime that carries a penalty of up to 90 days in prison per debt, and up to one year for a bounced check; courts routinely sentence people without even holding a hearing. The law does not make an exception for lack of income, or other factors that impede borrowers’ ability to repay, and the debt remains even after serving the sentence. Over a quarter-million Jordanians face complaints of debt delinquency and around 2,630 people, about 16 percent of Jordan’s prison population, were locked up for nonpayment of loans and bounced checks in 2019.

The response from the Jordanian Ministry of Justice is well worth reading, and it concludes by offering some hope: "A committee is reviewing the Execution Law in such a way to ensure justice and account for the interests of both parties (borrower and creditor)." Let us hope that this review concludes as it has in many, many countries around the world in recent years--with a proposal for the adoption of a personal bankruptcy law, following the guidance of the World Bank and other international organizations.

Book Recommendation: Caesars Palace Coup

posted by Jason Kilborn

A fun new book applies a revealing Law & Order analysis to the multi-billion-dollar, knock-down-drag-out reorganization of Caesar's Palace. In The Caesars Palace Coup, Financial Times editor, Sujeet Indap, and Fitch news team leader, Max Frumes, open with a detailed examination of the personalities and transactions that preceded the Caesars bankruptcy case, leading to the second (and, for me, more interesting) part of the book, tracking step-by-step the harrowing negotiations, court proceedings, and examiner report that led to the ultimate reorganization.

There is so much to like in this book. Its primary strength is its Law & Order backstory, peeling back the onion of every major player, revealing how they got to where they were in their careers in big business management, high finance, or law, and revealing their thoughts and motivations as the deals and legal maneuvers played out. Four years of painstaking personal interviews have paid off handsomely in this fascinating account of the inner workings of big money and big law reorganization practice. On a personal note, I was treated to a bit of nostalgia, as the book opens with and later features Jim Millstein, an absolute gem of a person who taught me about EBITDA when my path fortunately crossed with his at Cleary Gottlieb in New York City in the late 1990s. It also features the Chicago bankruptcy court in my backyard, which seldom hosts such mega cases as Caesars', and the story in the second half of this book reveals part of the reason why. Cameo appearances include some of my favorite academics, such as Nancy Rapoport, as fee examiner, and Slipster, Adam Levitin, as defender of the Trust Indenture Act. On that latter point, the book alludes to (but does not particularly carefully explain) the key role of the Marblegate rulings on the TIA, which is described in a bit more depth in a vintage Credit Slips post. Again, the book's most valuable contribution is a behind-the-scenes look at the motivations and machinations behind a salient instance of collateral stripping, adding to the literature on this (disturbing) trend.

For would-be, currently-are, or has-been (like me) business managers, investment bankers, hedge fund managers, and reorganization lawyers, this book is a fascinating under-the-hood analysis of every stage of a financial business restructuring (not much about the operational side). For anyone interested in the thoughts and motivations of the Masters of the Universe who control so much of our world and its most famous companies, this book offers a brutally honest peek at how the sausage is made. It's not always pretty, but it is both entertaining and enlightening.

Personal Bankruptcy Arrives in China in March 2021

posted by Jason Kilborn

The process I noted in an earlier post has come to fruition, and the Shenzhen special economic zone will introduce the first personal bankruptcy law in China, effective March 1, 2021. It will apply to a quite limited number of people (a total of about 12.5 million residents in Shenzhen three years ago, as of 2017, and one must have been a Shenzhen resident for three years to qualify for the new bankruptcy procedure), though by people, I mean real people, as it is not restricted to merchants or even business-related debts. This is a really powerful and bold step forward, and many have expressed concern about the payment-morality effects of such a liberal procedure for escaping from one's debts (the common phrase "lao lai" 老赖 means "debt dodger" or someone who evades responsibility).

That's why a discovery in the final text of the new law really struck me today. I was comparing the language from an early 2015 draft, the June 2020 draft, and the final version, adopted on August 26, 2020. The new word for "discharge" used for years in the earlier drafts was "mian ze" (免责), loosely, "free/excuse from responsibility." But between June and August, that term was replaced in over a dozen instances by a slightly different term, "mian chu" (免除), again loosely, "exemption/remission." In the couplet forming this new term, the character for "responsibility/duty" (ze 责) was replaced by a much less morally laden character carrying the meaning "get rid of, remove" (chu 除), which is more or less redundant with the meaning of the common first character (mian 免, excuse/waive). Neutralizing the concept of a discharge of debt to remove connotations of excusing someone from duty and replacing this with a sterile, redundant notion of simply removing (technical) liability struck me as an interesting rhetorical move.

I don't know if any ordinary Chinese person would perceive a difference here, but the US played this rhetorical game in the Bankruptcy Code by replacing the judgmental term "bankrupt" with the neutral term "debtor." This latest move to re-coin the new Chinese word for discharge seems to me to follow along those same lines. [Incidentally, I checked the Enterprise Bankruptcy Law, and neither term figures prominently in that law, which doesn't confer any discharge at all, so the Shenzhen authorities had to come up with a more or less new term.]

If you have a better sense of the potential emotional/rhetorical impact of this change, let me know what you think (I'm probably making too much of it, but it was an interesting twist).

New Greek Bankruptcy Code

posted by Jason Kilborn

Responding to an EU Directive and what was likely already a long-simmering plan to revise a not entirely satisfactory patchwork of constantly shifting bankruptcy and insolvency laws, the Greek government recently released a draft of a new Code for Debt Settlement and Second Chance. A webinar earlier this week hosted by Capital Link offered a rare insight into this developing legislation, introduced by the architects of the new law. If all goes as planned in the legislature, the new Code will become effective in 2021. Watch for much more of this type of activity in other European countries in the months ahead.

Personal Bankruptcy Coming to China

posted by Jason Kilborn

The English-language press has discovered a long-gestating project to introduce personal bankruptcy law in China. The project is described as "China's first personal bankruptcy law," though it remains just a draft for now, and it is strictly limited to longtime residents of Shenzhen, in the special economic zone just north of Hong Kong. If it's a success, something like this law may be rolled out across the country, as the CCP Central Committee (meeting at the 3rd session of the 13th National People's Congress a few weeks ago) explicitly announced its intention to "promote individual bankruptcy legislation" (see item 8, first paragraph). As far as the suggestion that this has been prompted in any sense by the COVID-19 pandemic, lawyers in Shenzhen have been working on this project since at least 2014, and they released a book-length discussion of this project in 2016. And as far as the characterization of this being "the first" such draft law, another extremely thoughtful and impressive draft law was released a few weeks ago by a group of bankruptcy scholars associated with the Research Center for Personal Bankruptcy Law of Beijing Foreign Studies University (coordinated by the amazingly energetic and dedicated Prof. Liu Jing). Meanwhile, courts in several southern coastal cities have been undertaking their own experiments with dealing with debt collection cases involving insolvent debtors. So ... BIG things have been underway in China on this topic for some time now. Stay tuned for more details on these interesting developments (I'm working on a couple of articles on developments in small business bankruptcy in the Arab world and in China this summer and fall ...).

What's in a Word: New Immigration Public Charge Rule and "Bankruptcy"?

posted by Jason Kilborn

I was surprised to find that the explosive new US immigration "public charge" rule has some interesting bankruptcy angles. The rule is a thinly veiled attempt to reduce immigration to the US by non-wealthy individuals (i.e., the vast majority of applicants) by expanding the legal basis for "inadmissibility" based on the likelihood that the immigrant might at some point become a "public charge" drain on the US public welfare system (such as it is). The indirect bankruptcy angle is how similar this is to the BAPCPA means testing fiasco of 2005. Want to reduce access to a public benefit on the pretextual basis that it's being "abused"? Simply ramp up the formalistic application requirements! The new rule imposes a ridiculous and substantial paperwork burden on immigrants to demonstrate that they're not "inadmissible" as potential public charges, requiring completion of a means-test like questionnaire (with often only vaguely relevant questions) supported by a thick sheaf of evidence. The direct bankruptcy angle is ... one of the questions is about bankruptcy! Item 14 (!) asks "Have you EVER filed for bankruptcy, either in the United States or in a foreign country?" (emphasis in original). The thing that struck me about this question is that, of the small but growing number of non-Anglo "foreign countries" that have a system for providing debt relief to individuals, few call this system "bankruptcy." That word is reserved for business cases, creditor-initiated cases, a traditional liquidation not involving a multi-year payment plan, or some other distinction. Individual debt-relief procedures are often intentionally called something other than bankruptcy to signal these differences, reduce the stigma of seeking relief, and emphasize the rehabilitative function of the procedure. The public charge form (and instructions) betray no familiarity with this reality, even in the context of a follow-up question, "Type of Bankruptcy," with check-boxes for "Chapter 7," "Chapter 11," and "Chapter 13." Chauvinism, anyone? I guess I should be relieved that the ignorance of the drafters of this silly and odious new rule might have undermined the "bankruptcy" question, but that leaves honest immigration attorneys in a bit of a bind: do I prompt my client to answer "yes" and explain that her country doesn't have three "Chapters" or even "bankruptcy," but that her gjeldsordning procedure was the functional equivalent? Oh, I forgot--immigration from Norway is actually encouraged!

Debt Limits ... and Poison Pills

posted by Jason Kilborn

The Russian Duma last week adopted on first reading a bill that attempts to solve the biggest problem with the new Russian personal insolvency law, but the bill contains a poison pill provision that will all but kill its effectiveness if the bill makes it past the second and third readings and becomes law.  The problem lawmakers are trying to solve is that far fewer than the anticipated (and desired) number of overindebted individuals are seeking relief. While policymakers estimate a stock of nearly 800,000 potential debtor-beneficiaries of the new bankruptcy relief, only a small fraction have applied, mostly due to the prohibitive cost of the procedure. The obvious solution? Make it less expensive by cutting out the needless and counterproductive formalism, especially the court process. Well, while that message is clearly reflected in the new bill and its proposed solution, the poison pill is in a different and easy-to-miss access restriction: The proposed out-of-court procedure (run and financed by self-regulating organizations of insolvency trustees, a clever and unique approach) is available only to debtors with no seizable income or assets and less than 50,000 rubles (US$2000 PPP) in all bank accounts over the past three months ... and with a total debt burden of no more than 500,000 rubles (US$20,000 PPP, or about $10,000 using official exchange rates). The estimate of 800,000 expected debtors, by the way, includes only individuals with more than 500,000 rubles in debt, so this new bill will not make any headway at all toward solving the existing problem. The English bankruptcy system has struggled with a similar problem of overly complex and therefore expensive access, too, and the English have "solved" this problem in a similar way, by making light-admin Debt Relief Orders available only to debtors with debts below £20,000. English analysts have estimated that more than 75% of bankruptcy debtors meet the "no income, no asset" DRO restriction, like that in the new Russian law, but the debt ceiling excludes them from the cheaper and more efficient form of DRO relief. This is pernicious and counterproductive, as Joseph Spooner argues in his terrific new book (see pp. 122-30). What is the purpose of excluding no-income, no-asset debtors from an efficient bankruptcy procedure because they have too much debt? It is extremely disheartening that the otherwise very clever and progressive new Russian NINA procedure contains the seeds of its own undoing. The new clinic will not treat patients with anything more than a common cold.

Small Biz Reorg Act Sleeper Innovations

posted by Jason Kilborn

Two aspects of the Small Business Reorganization Act of 2019 intrigued me as I looked more closely at this important new twist on Chapter 11 for the other 99%.

First, I thought the new SBRA procedure might be a fairly snooze-worthy Chapter 13 on protein supplements (i.e., not even steroids) because the current Chapter 13 debt limit (aggregate) is $1,677,125, while the new SBRA aggregate debt limit is less than double this, at $2,725,625 [note to the ABI: please update the figures in your online Code for the April 2019 indexation]. A couple of obvious and another non-obvious point cut in opposite directions here, it seems to me. First, Chapter 13 is not available to entities (e.g., LLCs), and for individuals, the Chapter 13 debt limits are broken out into secured and unsecured, while the SBRA figure is not. So the SBRA is significantly more hospitable to any small business debtor with only $500,000 in unsecured debt or, say, $1.5 million in secured debt. Flexibility is a virtue, so maybe the SBRA is just a meaningfully more flexible Chapter 13? No, as Bob's post reminded me. In the "conforming amendments" section at the end of the new law is hidden an important modification to the definition of "small business debtor" in section 101(51D), which will now require that "not less than 50 percent of [the debt] arose from the commercial or business activities of the debtor." So no using the SBRA provisions to deal more flexibly with an individual debtor's $500,000 in unsecured debt or a $1.5 million mortgage or HELOC if it's not related to business activity.

Second, this last point is the really intriguing aspect of SBRA for me. For the first time in recent memory, we see a crack in the wall that has insulated home mortgages from modification in bankruptcy. Sections 1322(b)(2) and 1123(b)(5) still prohibit the modification of claims secured by the debtor's principal residence, but the SBRA at last provides an exception to this latter provision: An SBRA plan may modify the debtor's home mortgage (including bifurcation into secured and unsecured portions?!) if "the new value received in connection with the granting of the security interest" was not used to acquire the home, but was "used primarily in connection with the small business of the debtor." A small crack it may be, but this sleeper provision strikes me as an important opening for serious discussion of modification of other non-acquisition home mortgage modifications in Chapter 13, for example. This would be a game changer after the HEL and HELOC craze of the earlier 2000s. It will doubtless provide further evidence that the HELOC market will not evaporate or even change appreciably as small business debtors begin to modify their home-secured business loans. Of course, that depends on a robust uptake of the new procedure. We shall see in 2020.

Small Borrowers Continue to Struggle Without Relief

posted by Jason Kilborn

Several recent stories remind us that many, many ordinary people around the world continue to struggle with crushing debt with no access to legal relief, and when relief is introduced, it is vehemently opposed by lenders and often limited to the most destitute of debtors.  These stories also reveal the dark underside of the much-heralded micro-finance industry.

In Cambodia, micro-finance debt has driven millions of borrowers to the the brink of family disaster, as micro-lenders have commonly taken homes and land as collateral for loans averaging only US$3370. When many of these loans inevitably tip into default, borrowers face deprivation of family land, at best, and homelessness at worst. Actually, in the absence of a personal bankruptcy law (which Cambodia still lacks), things can get much worse. If a firesale of the collateral leaves a deficiency, borrowers might be coerced into selling their children's labor or even migrating away to try to escape lender pursuit. In the past decade, the MFI loan portfolio in Cambodia has grown from US$300 million to US$8 billion, about one-third of the entire Cambodian GDP! People around the world have turned to micro-finance to sustain their lifestyles (or just to survive) in an era of increasing government austerity, with disastrous results for many borrowers.

In India, the government continues to delay the introduction of effective personal insolvency relief, and it seems concerned with the interests of only the lending sector in formulating a path to relief for "small distressed borrowers." In a story that fills only half a page, consideration of individual or national economic concerns is not mentioned, but it is noted four times that discussion/negotiation with the "microfinance industry" has occurred, whose satisfaction seems paramount to law reformers. Among the "safeguards" put in place to prevent "abuse" of this new relief are (1) the debtor's gross annual income must not exceed about US$450 ($70 per month), (2) the debtor's total debt must not exceed about US$500, and (3) the debtor's total assets must not exceed US$280. While this may well encompass many poor Indian borrowers in serious distress, it offers no relief to what are doubtless many, many "middle-class" Indians similarly pressed to the brink and straining to cope in a volatile economy.

In South Africa, a decades-long fight to implement effective discharge relief for individual debtors has culminated in a half-hearted revision of the National Credit Act (Bloomberg subscription likely required). The long-awaited revision still promises relief only to a small subset of severely distressed borrowers. The bill offers debt discharge only to "critically indebted" debtors with monthly income below US$500 and unsecured debts below US$3400. A step to be applauded, this still leaves many, many South Africans to contend with a complex web of insolvency-related laws that offers little or no relief to many if not most debtors. And still, banks engaged in the typical gnashing of teeth and shedding of crocodile tears, terribly worried that this new dispensation will "drive up the cost of loans for low-income earners, restrict lending and encourage bad behavior from borrowers." Where have we heard this before? To their credit, South African policymakers apparently "made no attempt to interact with the [lending] industry," though the compromise solution here still leaves much to be desired.

On a brighter note, the country of Georgia is on the verge of adopting major reforms to its laws on enforcement and business insolvency (story available only in the really neat Georgian language, check it out!). In an address to parliamentary committees, the Minister of Justice remarked that a new system of personal insolvency is also in development. Georgia suffers from many of the same problems of micro-finance as Cambodia, so perhaps Cambodia and other similarly situated countries will be able to learn from Georgia's example. We'll see what they come up with.

New Guide to Money Judgment Collection/Defense

posted by Jason Kilborn

EyesonthePrizecoverI excitedly tore into a small box this morning containing the first printing of my new book, Eyes on the Prize: Procedures and Strategies for Collecting Money Judgments and Shielding Assets (Carolina Academic Press 2019). Since the advent of the Bankruptcy Code in 1979, the study of how one collects a money judgment (or arbitral award) in law schools has become as rare as an involuntary bankruptcy petition against an individual debtor. But my students (and local lawyers) clamored for treatment of the topic for years, so I decided to do what I could to revive the subject. I was surprised at the diversity of approaches I found among the states (whose enforcement law applies to federal judgments, too, as described in the book), but I think I fairly survey the key variants by concentrating on a detailed exposition of the laws in New York, California, and Illinois, with a smattering of other salient state laws thrown in here and there (Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, Iowa, etc.). In the past, I've used my state's statutes and a series of hypothetical practice problems (both of which included in this book) for years in my Civil Procedure classes, and the students have voraciously devoured that material. More detailed comparative knowledge has also sharpened my appreciation for how the battle between judicial lienholders and secured creditors works. I tried to offer soup-to-nuts coverage here, from discovery to asset protection to bankruptcy, so I think a lot of readers will find something useful, especially new practitioners who likely learned none of this in law school. A bit more of a preview than appears in the "Look inside" link on CAP's website is available for free download on SSRN, as well. Check it out--and let me know what you think!

Seventh Circuit Smackdown of City of Chicago

posted by Jason Kilborn

The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals this week released its opinion in In re Fulton, the highly anticipated consolidated appeal of four Chapter 13 cases involving debtors whose cars had been impounded. The City of Chicago had refused to release them to the debtors (exercising the rights of trustee under section 1303) after the petition filings, as clearly required by section 542 and Seventh Circuit precedent, Thompson v. GMAC, 566 F3d 699 (7th Cir. 2009). The Court rejected the City's arguments in favor of repealing Thompson or recognizing a stay/turnover exception for the City to maintain its possessory lien on impounded cars by keeping, well, possession.

The Court reached the right result here, in my view, and two things really jumped out at me. First, the Court explains several times that the case should be governed by "the purpose of bankruptcy - 'to allow the debtor to regain his financial foothold and repay his creditors.'" The Court's emphasis on the debtor-salutary purpose of bankruptcy is refreshing, even in cases where the repaying-creditors purpose is likely to be largely defeated.

More striking were the first lines of the portion of the opinion recounting the facts of Fulton's case. She used the car "to commute to work, transport  her young daughter to day care, and care for her elderly parents on weekends." You can already anticipate where the Court is heading in the case, but then it gets better: "On December 24, 2017, three weeks after she purchased a 2015 Kia Soul, the City towed and impounded the vehicle for a prior citation of driving on a suspended license." Really??!! The City towed and impounded her new car on Christmas Eve!!?? It probably still had a temporary plate indicating it was new. And it got towed for what? A prior citation having nothing to do with the car at all. Note to self, City of Chicago: When the Court opens the fact section with a smackdown recounting @$$hole behavior like this, you can just skip to the end. You lose. Three cheers for the Seventh Circuit again!

Reverse Mortgage Meltdown ... and Gov't Complicity?

posted by Jason Kilborn

USA Today just came out with an interesting expose about reverse mortgages and their negative impact, especially in low-income, African American, urban neighborhoods (highlighting a few in my backyard here in Chicago). I have long been interested in reverse mortgages, touted in TV ads by seemingly trustworthy spokespeople like Henry Winkler and Alex Trebek as sources of risk-free cash for folks enjoying their golden years, and I am always on the lookout for explanations of the pitfalls. Most of these breathless critiques strike me as overkill, but the USA Today story reveals fairly compelling real stories of a few of the ways in which a combination of financial illiteracy and sharp marketing tactics can lead to bad outcomes ranging from rude awakening (heirs having to buy back their childhood homes) to tragedy (simple missed paperwork deadlines leading to foreclosure and an abusive accumulation of default and attorney fee charges).

One line really jumped out at me. In defense of their seemingly hard-hearted and Emersonian-foolish-consistencies-being-the-hobgoblins-of-little-minds conduct, an industry spokesperson deflects, "lenders would prefer to extend the deadlines for older borrowers but fear violating HUD guidelines." Another bank official chimes in, “No matter how heinous or heartbreaking the case, it’s not our call. There’s no wiggle room,” adding that the stress of being unable to behave in a commercially and morally reasonable manner “takes a toll on employees.” [Yes, the unquoted characterization of the rigid lender behavior is mine, not the bank official's].

"Really??!!," I wondered. I wouldn't put any outrage past the Trump administration these days, but forcing banks to foreclose because an elderly surviving spouse overlooked a single piece of paperwork and is prepared to fix the problem a few days past the deadline strikes me as ... hard to believe. Is the government complicit in these reverse mortgage tragedies because it forces lenders to observe rules and deadlines rigidly? If so, how sad and frustrating, and yet another sign of the failures of our modern political stalemate between rational compromise and hysteria, where the latter seems to be winning on all sides.

St. Petersburg Int'l Legal Forum & Insolvency Forum

posted by Jason Kilborn

I've just returned from a really fantastic conference, the entire recorded proceedings of which are available online and might be of interest to Credit Slips readers. The St. Petersburg International Legal Forum takes place annually in the marvelous city of St. Petersburg, Russia, and nestled within the broader forum is a two-day International Insolvency Forum. The numerous panels for this forum were recorded, both in English with Russian simultaneous translation and in Russian with simultaneous English translation--it was a magnificently well-organized undertaking. The insolvency forum was held on Thursday and Friday (May 16 and 17) in the main auditorium, with an agenda including panels on implementation of a rescue culture in business reorganization (chaired by INSOL Europe), digital technology in insolvency proceedings, enforcement proceedings and involuntary bankruptcy petitions (which included a great introduction to Israel's new personal insolvency procedure by the Official Receiver of Israel, the always impressive David Hahn), consumer insolvency (chaired by a member of the State Duma, and including presentations by a Supreme Court justice and other impressive Russian and foreign experts--this was the panel on which I presented on the sticky issue of financing low-value personal insolvency cases), and asset tracing.

The hosts and attendees of the forum were very grateful for and receptive to the exchange of ideas and opinions from non-Russian experts, and they seem eager to recruit more of this kind of exchange in the coming years. If you're interested in participating and/or presenting in May of next year, please let me know, and I'll coordinate and pass on the info to the organizers. St. Petersburg is an absolutely gorgeous place, and it is a very European-ized Russian city (as was Peter the Great's goal in founding the new capital there in the early 1700s). It has changed dramatically since I lived and studied there in college in the early 1990s; today, it is safe, clean, and easy to navigate, there is English on all the signs, most shop and restaurant employees speak English, and the restaurant scene is accessible, varied, and delicious, to say nothing of the world-class cultural opportunities.  Consider it!

Consumer Bankruptcy Reform ... and American Xenophobia?

posted by Jason Kilborn

I hope I'm not stepping on Bob's toes in announcing the public release of the long-awaited report of the ABI Commission on Consumer Bankruptcy. The Commission, with Credit Slips' own inimitable Bob Lawless as its reporter, was formed in December 2016 to explore revisions to the US consumer bankruptcy system that would improve the operation of its existing structure; that is, evolution, not revolution. With this explicitly limited charge, one would not necessarily expect to find much high-level discussion of how the US approach squares with or fits within the many recent global developments in consumer insolvency relief, and one would expect to see a concentration on local solutions for local stumbling blocks.

That being said ... and in no way to detract from the monumental amount and truly impressive nature of the work the Commission has done here ... one might have expected to see a bit of discussion, if not even a touch of inspiration, from comparative sources. In 1970, the Bankruptcy Commission rejected any consideration of foreign developments in consumer bankruptcy, in part because there were few such developments, and in part because so little was known about the operation of non-US bankruptcy law at the time (for those younger than I, note that neither home computers nor the public Internet existed in 1970 ...). Nearly 50 years later, we now have at our fingertips a mountain of comparative data and analysis on the development, operation, and revision of consumer insolvency systems around the world, much of it reported in English specifically to make it widely available to law reformers like the ABI Commission. Again, one would not have expected this comparative material to occupy center stage in a reform of largely US problems in the uniquely US consumer bankruptcy system. But in a bit part here and there, some comparative observations might have supported the Commission's already compelling recommendations.

Continue reading "Consumer Bankruptcy Reform ... and American Xenophobia?" »

The Curious Persistence of Plan B (Bankruptcy Lite)

posted by Jason Kilborn

I've come across a phenomenon numerous times over the years, again recently, that reveals the purpose of and resistance to discharge as the ultimate solution/relief for bankruptcy. In a discussion of the Chinese Supreme People's Court's struggles with "the enforcement difficulty" (执行难), the writers observe that, if a judgment debtor is found by the court enforcement division to have no available assets against which to collect a judgment, the enforcement action is terminated ... but "the court will automatically check every six months whether the involved judgment debtors have new property." On the one hand, the termination of fruitless enforcement actions sounds something like bankruptcy relief. Assuming the process actually works like this, and assuming the court enforcement division is not overly aggressive in pursuing "new property," this seems to me to take some of the pressure off of the Chinese system to adopt a proper bankruptcy discharge to alleviate the suffering of insolvent judgment debtors. On the other hand, without a discharge, the "checking for new property" part ensures that debtors' incentives to be productive will remain perpetually depressed, and official resources will be perpetually wasted in interminable pursuit of phantom new assets. These debtors' productivity and entrepreneurialism is forever lost to Chinese society in an era in which global competition continues to heat up.

Continue reading "The Curious Persistence of Plan B (Bankruptcy Lite)" »

More Data, Please!

posted by Jason Kilborn

Effective reform requires detailed knowledge of exactly what's being reformed. This is especially true of complex systems like corporate and individual insolvency regimes, with numerous inputs and outputs and carefully counterbalanced policy objectives. Two recent papers accentuate an acute weakness in global insolvency reform development--a lack of reliable and comprehensive data on the operation of existing systems, which will of course infect future planned procedures, as well. The global insolvency team at the IMF notes this problem in the context of its current advisory operations, and Adam Feibelman anticipates this problem with respect to India's developing insolvency and bankruptcy law. Both suggest a solution in more careful attention to data production and tracking. Both papers are interesting reading for those concerned with a more responsible approach to global insolvency policy-making, where for far too long it seems the old joke about empirical analysis has rung true: anecdote is not the singular of data.

FDCPA Exclusion for Litigating Attorneys

posted by Jason Kilborn

On the heels of oral arguments in the latest Supreme Court case concerning application of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act to lawyers, ABA President Bob Carlson has a comment in Bloomberg Law today {subscription maybe required} explaining succinctly why litigating lawyers should be excluded from the FDCPA. He carefully distinguishes lawyers collecting debts outside the litigation context (pre-filing)--whom the FDCPA might reasonably regulate--but he convincingly argues for exemption for those involved in active litigation (I would hope and presume this applies to both the pre-judgment and post-judgment stages, the latter being the subject of a little book on judgment enforcement I've just written, including a bit about the FDCPA). The courts provide adequate oversight and abuse prevention in this formal collection context, Carlson argues, and the "gotcha" pitfalls for otherwise innocuous behavior in the FDCPA (especially the required "mini-Miranda" and validation notices) are unjustifiable as applied to court-supervised litigating lawyers. We'll see how warm a reception HR 5082 receives in Congress. 

International & Comparative Insolvency Law Symposium CFP

posted by Jason Kilborn

If you're wondering what to do with your New Year's downtime, you might consider submitting a paper proposal for an International & Comparative Insolvency Law Symposium, this year to be held at the beautiful University of Miami (in Coral Gables) on November 14-15, 2019. The hosts are Drew Dawson (Miami), Laura Napoli Coordes (Arizona State), Adrian Walters (Chicago-Kent) and Christoph Henkel (Mississippi College). This is the second (annual?) such event, and if last year's symposium is any indication, it should be great. Proposal submissions are due January 31, 2019. See you there? 

Developing Personal Insolvency Crises in China and India

posted by Jason Kilborn

What is it like to be desperately insolvent with no access to a relief system like the bankruptcy discharge? Many, many people are likely to find out in the coming months in China and India in light of recent developments in these mammoth markets. Neither country currently offers individuals effective relief from financial distress, though both have been actively but languidly considering the adoption of such relief for a long time. That relief can't come soon enough, though I'm not optimistic about its arrival anytime in the near future.

In China, the government is stepping up its efforts to all but eliminate P2P lending platforms, the only reliable source of finance for most individuals and small businesses. I'm afraid Bob Lawless's "paradox of consumer credit" will apply here: a rapid constriction in the supply of consumer/small business credit will lead to a spike in financial distress that can't be avoided by refinancing ... leading to even greater need for an individual bankruptcy remedy that China still lacks. To be sure, many of these P2P lending networks have been ponzi schemes, victimizing innocent investor-lenders and needing to be shut down, but I fear an over-correction here. Resolving 1.22 trillion RMB ($176 billion) in loans extended by 50 million investor-lenders to goodness knows how many small borrowers will be no small feat, especially with no formal insolvency framework to organize the effort. 

Meanwhile in India, the hot mess of corporate debt has begun to cool off, leaving debt buyers hungry for even riskier loans to purchase and pursue. So they're refocusing on defaulted consumer debt. The short-term target is debt secured by homes and cars, likely to produce greater returns from the collateral, but what of the inevitable deficiencies? Unsecured personal liability for deficiency judgments will certainly be on the to-do list of these buyers in the near term, and they are already making plans for the longer term to expand to unsecured education and credit card loans.

While India and China have both made admirable progress in reforming their business insolvency systems, the tragedy unfolding in the consumer and small business sectors cries out for serious attention. These debtors are not deadbeats whom authorities can be content to leave to their chosen fates; they are the victims of global economic volatility, the lifeblood of developing economies, and the center of harmonious societies. China and India would advance and humanize their development in a massive way by finally addressing the gaping hole in their insolvency frameworks to add proper treatment for individual debtors.

World Bank Group's Proposals on Small Business Insolvency

posted by Jason Kilborn

At long last, the World Bank Group's insolvency and debt resolution team has finally released to the public its report on the treatment of the insolvency of micro-, small-, and medium-sized enterprises, Saving Entrepreneurs, Saving Enterprises : Proposals on the Treatment of MSME Insolvency. The team worked for over a year on this report, concluding with a meeting of its Insolvency & Creditor/Debtor Regimes Task Force in May in Washington, D.C., where the report and its proposals were vetted. There was a surprising degree of consensus on the proposals developed here, and the final version reflects a fairly widely shared viewpoint on three key points.

Continue reading "World Bank Group's Proposals on Small Business Insolvency" »

Tripling Down on Plain Meaning: Bankruptcy and the Kavanaugh Appointment

posted by Jason Kilborn

It seems fairly clear that, if Trump's latest nominee to the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, is sworn in, the Court's trend of resolving virtually all statutory disputes on the basis of "plain meaning" will be cemented in place. An analysis of Kavanaugh's bankruptcy-specific jurisprudence seems unnecessary in light of his fairly clear comments, nicely summarized by Anthony Gaughan over at the Faculty Lounge blog. His rejection of legislative history and search for intent/purpose does not bode well for bankruptcy and consumer-protection disputes, such as Obduskey v. McCarthy & Holthus LLP, the FDCPA case on the Court's docket for next year. Perhaps the words in these statutes are less clear and meaningful than those in the Constitution, but it seems likely that a Justice Kavanaugh would retreat to the comfortable confines of statutory language as frequently as possible to maintain his vision of a passive and unthreatening judiciary. Dust off your Webster's and probably also your Garner!

File This Under Calling BS on Bankruptcy Fearmongering

posted by Jason Kilborn

As anyone familiar with bankruptcy would have predicted, the dire predictions of disaster for municipalities seeking bankruptcy protection have proven to be ... let's just say exaggerated. Bloomberg is out with a notable story this morning on Jefferson County's healthy return to the bond market, carrying an investment-grade rating of AA-  within five years of emerging from municipal bankruptcy. This squares with similar accounts of consumers rehabilitating their credit within two to four years of a chapter 7 liquidation-and-discharge (see, for example, here and here). Let's all file this in our "lying liars and their bankruptcy impact lies" file and be prepared to continue to counter this, among the many, many other, bankruptcy scare myths to be debunked.

Combatting Fear of Abuse--A Sisyphean Task?

posted by Jason Kilborn

Over the past few weeks, at conferences with judges and policymakers in Varna (Bulgaria), Seoul, and Beijing, I've been confronted with a surprising degree of skepticism about personal insolvency systems and fear of opportunistic individuals abusing the ability to evade their debts (especially while hiding assets). I've pointed out the interesting progression identifiable in Europe in recent years of a marked relaxation of such fear of abuse, especially in places like France and most recently Slovakia, which have gone all the way to adopting a very US-like open-access system to immediate discharge. For the real skeptics--and they are numerous in Bulgaria and China, both of whom are considering adopting their first personal insolvency laws--these arguments seem to fall on more or less deaf ears. Detractors put me in a no-win situation by offering one of two rejoinders: (1) the incidence of discovered abuse is low in these systems because debtors are crafty or anti-abuse institutions are weak, or (2) anti-abuse institutions like the means test and restrictive access hurdles are successfully dissuading abusers from seeking access, so we need more--not less--of this kind of effort (which I've criticized as wasteful, unnecessary, and counterproductive). A common third response is the classic "we're different" position--that is, any comparative empirical evidence from elsewhere is irrelevant to the new, entirely unique context of [insert skeptical country's name here].

Continue reading "Combatting Fear of Abuse--A Sisyphean Task?" »

Please support empirical study of decision making in business insolvency

posted by Jason Kilborn

Leiden University in the Netherlands has established an impressive strength in insolvency law studies. For example, following his retirement, the eminent Bob Wessels left his massive collection of literature on the subject to a foundation, which permanently lent the collection to the school as the Bob Wessels Insolvency Law Collection. Credit Slips readers can support the efforts of Leiden researchers without parting with their libraries by simply responding to a 15-minute online questionnaire. Niek Strohmaier is a Ph.D. candidate at Leiden conducting a study on judgment and decision making within the areas of business rescue and insolvency law. As he puts it, "We offer a novel perspective on these fields by utilizing the interdisciplinary nature of our research team and by adopting a social sciences approach with empirical research methods." If there's one thing that Credit Slips can rally around, it's empirical research! So I'm hoping we can show Niek our community spirit by responding to his survey at this link (http://leidenuniv.eu.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_51GewBINfBAyfzv). The survey has received a good response from the professional membership of INSOL Europe, but I hope we can supercharge this qualitative data collection with responses from North America and elsewhere, as well. Thanks for your help!

Orwellian Debt Collection in China

posted by Jason Kilborn

Trying to get a handle on the potential for a workable personal bankruptcy procedure in China, I've repeatedly encountered evidence that the most important element might be lacking: attitude. Successful personal insolvency systems around the world differ in design and operation, but the system architects and operators generally share a sense that default is an inevitable aspect of consumer/entrepreneurial risk, and mitigating the long-term effects of such defaults is good for debtors, creditors, and society. I don't get the sense, based on my admittedly superficial outsider perspective, that this foundation is ready in China. Indeed, quite the opposite. 

For example, for the past few years, the Supreme People's Court has run a "judgment defaulter's list" of individuals who have failed (been unable?) to satisfy judgments against them. More than 3 million names were on this list already by the end of 2015, and getting on this list means more than just public shaming; it's also a "no-fly" list, preventing defaulters from buying airplane tickets, in addition to a "no-high-speed-train" and "no-hotel-stay" list, and also a "no-sending-your-kids-to-paid-schools" list. By mid-2016, about 5 million people had been preventing from buying these services in China as a result of being on the list. This initiative is just the start of a planned "Social Credit System," which will aggregate electronic data (including not only payment history, but also buying habits, treatment of one's parents, and who one's associates are) to produce a "social credit score" for all individuals. This score will affect all manner of life events, such as access not only to loans, but also to housing access, work promotions, honors, and other social benefits. The potential problems with data integrity (including inaccurate data), among many other challenges, are discussed in this fascinating paper by Yongxi Chen and Anne Sy Cheung of the Univ. of Hong Kong

Continue reading "Orwellian Debt Collection in China" »

Seventh Circuit Victorious Again in Merit Mgmt

posted by Jason Kilborn

If you're challenging a Seventh Circuit ruling in a bankruptcy case on appeal to the Supreme Court, especially if (retired) Judge Posner was in the majority, you've got a challenge ahead. The Court's announcement this morning of its judgment in Merit Management Group v. FTI Consulting demonstrates this yet again. Long story short: paying for stock via a bank transfer (rather than a bag of money) is still a transfer from the buyer to the seller, not the buyer's and seller's banks, and therefore not "by or to ... a financial institution." That is, such transfers are not protected by the securities safe harbor provision in section 546(e) and are subject to avoidance as constructive fraudulent conveyances and/or preferences. The seeming silver-bullet arguments to the contrary in this battle of "plain meanings" apparently remained unarticulated and unavailing (see footnote 2 in the Court's opinion, suggesting someone up there might be reading CreditSlips!). Other big winners in addition to the Illinois-based Seventh Circuit are University of Illinois College of Law professors Charles Tabb and Ralph Brubaker, both of whom are cited prominently and approvingly in the opinion. Congratulations, Illinois!

New Saudi Bankruptcy Law ... A Boon for SMEs?!

posted by Jason Kilborn

Saudi Arabia's King Salman has approved a new bankruptcy law. {Download Saudi BK final 2-2018} Commentators have heralded this new law as a boost to economic reforms, in particular to the SME sector, but I have some serious doubts about this. A member of the Shura Council, the King's advisory body, is quoted in one report as explaining "[t]he idea is to simplify and institutionalise the process of going out of business so new organisations can come in." That latter part--new businesses coming in--requires individual entrepreneurs, either the one whose business just failed or new ones, to embrace the major risks of starting a new venture. In either event, a crucial aspect of an effective SME insolvency law, and I would argue THE most crucial aspect, is a fresh start for the failed entrepreneur (and a promise of such a fresh start for potential entrepreneurs). This fresh start is promised and delivered most effectively by provision conferring a discharge of unpaid debt. The new Saudi law all but lacks this key provision. Article 125 on the bottom of page 50 is quite clear about this: "The debtor's liability is not discharged ... for remaining debts other than by a special or general release from the creditors." It seems highly unlikely to me that creditors will offer such releases with any frequency. Yes, the new law provides a useful framework for negotiating restructuring plans, and the Kingdom deserves praise and respect for finally adopting such a measure. But the lack of a law- imposed discharge following liquidation when creditors are not willing to agree is not a foundation for a thriving SME recovery (though I understand and respect the reason why the Saudi law lacks an imposed discharge). Most SMEs are not enterprises--they are entrepreneurs; they are people, not businesses. Leaving these people to bear the continuing burden of unpaid debt does not, in my mind, reinvigorate failed entrepreneurship or entice others to join the movement. I'm afraid the effects on the SME sector of this law will be muted at best. I hope I'm wrong. 

Jayfest and Bankruptcy Cases in the Supreme Court

posted by Jason Kilborn

Most of us Credit Slipsters enjoyed an absolutely fabulous symposium over the weekend celebrating the illustrious career of one of our own, Jay Westbrook. The Texas Law Review will publish a selection of several of the papers presented at the symposium (and TLR editors pulled off an amazing feat of organization in coordinating the travel and other logistics for this major event--kudos to them). All of the presentations were cutting-edge and extremely impressive, and many are available on the SSRN profiles of the authors listed in the symposium program. I want to highlight just one that I thought would be of particularly broad interest to Credit Slips readers.

The always impressive Ronald Mann described his recently released book, Bankruptcy and the U.S. Supreme Court. In his characteristically insightful and probing way, Mann looks into the private papers of the Justices for evidence of how and why they decide bankruptcy cases as they do. In his fascinating presentation at the symposium, he challenged conventional explanations of why the Court has construed the law to provide generally narrow relief (not only because of their boredom with the subject matter and/or a supposed adherence to narrow construction of statutory language) and offered provocative explanations based on, among other things, the presence (or absence) of a federal agency to advance a case for broader relief. The introduction of this new book immediately brought to my mind another recent and impressive analysis of Supreme Court bankruptcy jurisprudence, Ken Klee's Bankruptcy and the Supreme Court: 1801-2014. But Mann's latest contribution really seems to add something valuable, illuminating, and entertaining. Readers of this great new book will not find themselves, as Mann described one Justice's reaction to an oral argument, "in sleepy distress." Check it out, and watch for what will be a value-packed Texas Law Review symposium issue.

Comparative Insolvency Conferences of Note

posted by Jason Kilborn

I thought Credit Slips readers might be interested in using some holiday down-time to catch up on a couple of recent comparative insolvency conferences with particularly cutting-edge presentations, some of which are or will be available for viewing online (and many of the papers are available on SSRN or elsewhere).

First, on Nov. 23-24, the Notary College of Madrid offered its spectacular hall to host an international conference on consumer credit information privacy and regulation (day one) and the treatment of insolvency for SMEs and consumers (day two). The second day offered a particularly interesting presentation by one of the leaders of the EU Commission's initiative for a Directive on harmonization of European laws on preventive restructuring and second chance discharge relief (followed by a bit of constructively critical commentary by an American who fancies he knows something about European personal insolvency). Recordings of the entire conference were just posted to YouTube--most of the recordings are in Spanish, but the EU Directive and critical commentary presentations are in English after a short Spanish intro (nos. 8 and 9 of the 10 recordings). Congratulations to the architects of this fabulous event, who also made impressive presentations: Matilde Cuena Casas (Univ. Complutense de Madrid), Ignacio Tirado Martí (Univ. Autónoma de Madrid), and David Ramos Muñoz (Univ. Carlos III de Madrid).

Second, the following week offered a special, rare treat with the conference, Comparative and Cross-Border Issues in Bankruptcy and Insolvency Law, hosted by the Law Review of the Chicago-Kent College of Law. The line-up of panels on both comparative and cross-border issues was particularly impressive, and we were treated to a keynote by Jay Westbrook refining his latest thinking about cross-border coordination. The conference was live streamed, and the recordings are promised in the near future, but for now, the livestream page still has (scroll down to Day 1) the recoding of Adrian Walters's terrific paper on restrictive English interpretation of the notion of international cooperation. Again congratulations to the organizers of this fabulous event (who, again, gave very impressive presentations of their own): Adrian Walters, Chicago-Kent College of Law, and Christoph Henkel, Mississippi College School of Law.

Merit v. FTI and the Missing Silver Bullet Argument?

posted by Jason Kilborn

On November 6, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case only a lawyer--and probably only a commercial or bankruptcy lawyer--could love, Merit Management Group v. FTI Consulting. Simplifying quite a bit, the issue is whether a payment by wire transfer (or presumably a check) is "made by" the bank who implements the funds transfer, or the customer who initiates the transfer. The issue arises from the safe harbor for securities contract-related settlement payments, insulating such transfers from avoidance (clawback) by a bankruptcy trustee, and the question whether a money transfer made by wire from the buyer of stock to the purchaser(s) was "made by or to ... a financial institution." 11 USC § 546(e). Several circuit courts have held the safe harbor applies even if the bank-transferor is a simple conduit, performing nothing more than the ministerial task of moving the money (so to speak) from buyer's account to seller's bank. The 7th Circuit held to the contrary in this case, noting that a letter might be said to be "sent by" either the sender or the Postal Service, but the former interpretation is more sensible and consonant with likely congressional intent in this context (again, vastly simplifying to prevent boring readers to death). 

Ordinarily I would leave it to those smarter than I to blog about these kinds of big-money cases, but after I was asked to write a little squib for the ABA about it, the extremely perceptive Henry Kevane of the famous insolvency firm Pachulski Stang in San Francisco saw my little piece and called me to ask about an argument relevant to the case. Did anyone point out, Henry asked me, that the definition of "financial institution" in section 101(22)(A) includes the bank's customer within the ambit of "financial institution" in cases where the bank is "acting as agent or custodian for a customer ... in connection with a securities contract"? Well, no, no one appears to have made this seemingly dispositive observation! A transferor bank implementing a wire transfer would certainly be acting as the customer's (account holder's) agent, and the whole point of the case is that the payment was made "in connection with a securities contract" (the same language in section 546(e)). If the Bankruptcy Code oddly defines the customer and the bank as both being a "financial institution" in this context, then regardless of who made the payment, it was made "by" and "to" a financial institution, since the same logic would apply on the recipient side, too. Hmmmmmmmm.

Continue reading "Merit v. FTI and the Missing Silver Bullet Argument?" »

A Quiet Revolution in Pension Reform

posted by Jason Kilborn

A historic vote was announced overnight that signals a new era for large pension reform. As is often the case, "reform" here means that ordinary, hard-working folks will suffer a significant amount of pain as big companies are relieved of some liabilities, but the hope is it will be less painful than the alternative. The revolution began in 2014, when Congress adopted the Multiemployer Pension Reform Act (MPRA).  The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation guarantees a portion of the benefits due to participants in pension plans that have become insolvent, but as a result, it is also facing a nearly $100 million shortfall in its ability to cover the projected volume of its existing guarantees. Congress attempted to avert disaster by allowing particularly large and especially distressed pension funds to slash benefits themselves in order to maintain solvency. Ordinarily, this extraordinary action would, if possible at all, require an insolvency filing and court oversight of some kind, but the MPRA allows plans who aggregate benefits for many companies (multiemployer plans) to apply to the Treasury Department for administrative permission to abrogate their pension agreements and cut benefits with no court filing or general reorganization proceeding. There are, of course, restrictions on the level of distress required for such a move and the degree of proposed cuts, but the MPRA allows large pension funds to reduce the pension benefits of thousands of beneficiaries with simple administrative approval. The plan participants get a vote on such proposals, but the law builds in a presumption: Treasury-approved cuts go into effect unless a majority of plan beneficiaries votes to reject the cuts.

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Old-Fashioned Insolvency Policy in India

posted by Jason Kilborn

It seems to me a sign of serious regulatory dysfunction when a government expressly uses bankruptcy law as a means of collection, rather than rescue or at least collective redress, with an aim to treating economic stagnation. I've seen several stories recently like this one, touting the new Indian insolvency law and government regulators' strategy of putting pressure on banks to use involuntary insolvency (creditors' petitions) to clean up the NPL problems of a series of major industrial firms. The notion that insolvency law is about collecting NPLs seems at best anachronistic, and likely at least a sign of major dysfunction in other law or policy.

The right way for one lender (including the government tax collector) to collect one defaulted loan is to engage an ordinary collections process (judgment enforcement)--which itself might well result in the sale of the company, as envisioned in the story linked above. Creditor-initiated bankruptcy/insolvency proceedings should be the nuclear option, engaged only when creditors are worried that the debtor's assets will be dissipated by other enforcing creditors before the later-in-time ones can reach the ordinary enforcement stage. Such cases should be rare. The primary users of modern insolvency law should be debtors responding to positive incentives to seek an orderly opportunity for a global renegotiation of their debts, or an orderly way for the governors of those companies to liquidate and redeploy the assets of their companies more effectively--avoiding in the process a protracted battle about their own liabilities as personal guarantors and/or as directors liable for "insolvent trading." 

The subtext of the stories I've seen about the new Indian insolvency law seem to be (1) it does not provide an adequate incentive for debtor-companies to seek either rehabilitation or orderly liquidation when they realize they're in obvious financial distress, (2) the ordinary collections apparatus in India must be totally dysfunctional if banks have no incentive to engage it to deal with their NPLs, (3) the new insolvency law also provides an inadequate incentive for creditors to engage it to seek collective redress, since the government has to put pressure on banks to do so, and (4) all of the work on proper, modern insolvency policy in recent years by UNCITRAL, the IMF and World Bank, and many, many others has been lost on Indian regulators. Especially in developing nations like India and South Africa, the battle over the appropriate, modern role of insolvency law as debtor-initiated rescue or exit, as opposed to old-fashioned creditor-initiated collections, continues to rage.

 

Dana Gas and an Existential Crisis for Islamic Finance

posted by Jason Kilborn

IslamicartThe very foundations of the Islamic finance world were shaken a few weeks ago when Dana Gas declared that $700 million of its Islamic bonds (sukuk) were invalid and obtained a preliminary injunction against creditor enforcement from a court in the UAE emirate of Sharjah. Like Marblegate on steriods, Dana made this announcement as a prelude to an exchange offer, proposing that creditors accept new, compliant bonds with a return less than half that offered by the earlier issuance.

Dana shockingly claimed that evolving standards of Islamic finance had rendered its earlier bonds unlawful under current interpretation of the Islamic prohibition on interest and the techniques Dana had used to issue bonds carrying an interest-like investment return. I had expected to read that Dana had used an aggressive structure like tawarruq (sometimes called commodity murabahah) that pushed the boundaries of what the Islamic finance world generally countenanced, but no. The structure Dana had used was totally mainstream, a partnership structure called mudarabah. Dana asserted that the mudarabah structure had been superseded by other structures, such as a leasing arrangement called ijarah, though in Islamic law as in other legal families, there are often multiple permissible ways of achieving a goal, not just one. And when an issuer prepares an Islamic finance structure like this, it invariably gets a sign-off from a shariah-compliance board of respected Islamic law experts (sometimes several such boards). For Dana Gas to suggest that its earlier board was wrong to the tune of $700 million, or worse yet that Islamic law had somehow changed in a few years through an abrupt alteration of opinion by the world of respected Islamic scholars is ... troubling.

Continue reading "Dana Gas and an Existential Crisis for Islamic Finance" »

Plain Meaning Rolls On in Gorsuch's First [Credit Related] Opinion

posted by Jason Kilborn

It was not at all surprising that, for his first (traditionally unanimous) opinion, in Henson v. Santander, the new Justice Gorsuch took on the relatively simple and low-key issue of the definition of "debt collector" in the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. It was also not surprising that he hewed quite closely to the approach of his predecessor in basing his decision on the "plain meaning" of the words in the statute, complete with grammatical analysis of past participles and participial adjectives (the example adduced, "burnt toast," might describe how the consumer protection industry will view this latest ruling). The FDCPA is as simple as it appears, the Court confirmed:  if you're collecting a (consumer) debt owed to someone else, then you're a debt collector; if you're collecting on a debt owed to you, for your own account, you're not a debt collector, even if, as in Santander's case, you bought the debt from the original creditor with the intention of collecting it for an arbitrage profit later. The notion that Congress did not foresee the debt buying industry and its explosive growth when it wrote the FDCPA in the 1960s, and it certainly would have wanted to constrain abusive collections practices by debt buyers as much as by debt collectors was ... wait for it ... a matter for the present Congress to clarify. You can almost see Scalia whispering in Gorsuch's (or his clerk's) ear as the opinion is drafted. Well, at least there's something to be said for predictability.

New Museum of Failure

posted by Jason Kilborn

A new Museum of Failure in Sweden stands as a tribute to the notion that failure is just an opportunity for learning, powering growth and future innovation. I thought no group could appreciate that as much as Credit Slips readers. Europe is still in the process of shaking off its ages old stigma with respect to failure, especially in the context of individual entrepreneurialism. It's amazing how difficult real reform of both business and personal insolvency law has been and continues to be there (and elsewhere outside the Anglo-American world). I've long thought that shaking off these hangups, embracing failure, and facilitating fresh innovation are among the core attitudes that have made America great. Three cheers for failure!

New ABI Commission on Consumer Bankruptcy

posted by Jason Kilborn

The American Bankruptcy Institute announced this morning that it has convened a commission to study and propose reforms of the US consumer bankruptcy system. In light of the success of ABI's Chapter 11 commission, we can expect big things from this commission on Chapters 7 and 13. Some major names in consumer bankruptcy are among the 15 members of the commission, and Credit Slips is well represented, with Bob Lawless as Reporter and Katie Porter on the membership roster, along with one more super-prominent academic, professor-cum-judge-cum-professor Bruce Markell, now of Northwestern. I wish the commission had consulted Bob about its name. He would have pointed to his empirical work on small business debtors to suggest that this be called a personal bankruptcy commission, rather than consumer, but perhaps the inclusion of a good deal of small business debtors and business-related debts is taken as a given. Anyway, best wishes to the commission--we'll eagerly await its first reports and calls for comments!

What to Expect From Justice-To-Be Gorsuch on Bankruptcy

posted by Jason Kilborn

When I heard that the President had nominated 10th Circuit Judge Neil Gorsuch for the Supreme Court, I wondered what his bankruptcy-related opinions might tell us about him. Bill Rochelle beat me to it, with his characteristically insightful analysis of a few salient Gorsuch opinions. But I found three more that I thought worth highlighting, as well. A simple takeaway from all of these cases is that Gorsuch is not at all what one might call “debtor-friendly.” In fact, I don’t think one of the dozen-or-so opinions I found ruled in favor of the debtor(s). But a more nuanced takeaway is that Gorsuch is a careful and serious jurist who will apply the letter of the law in tight and cleverly written opinions. At least he should be fairly predictable, a virtue that the person who nominated Judge Gorsuch does not share.

Continue reading "What to Expect From Justice-To-Be Gorsuch on Bankruptcy" »

What's Wrong with the Bankruptcy Courts?

posted by Jason Kilborn

The Judiciary Data and Analysis Office of the Administrative Office of the US Courts has launched a new feature called "Just the Facts," highlighting statistical trends in the US judiciary. Table 2 and Chart 3 of the inaugural report reflect a curious spike in the appellate reversal rate in bankruptcy cases in 2015. While the reversal rate for both ordinary civil cases and bankruptcy cases in the Courts of Appeals had hovered steadily around 10-12% from 2011 to 2014, the reversal rate in bankruptcy cases suddenly shot up to double that, 24% (!), in 2015. It is not entirely clear to me whether this is reversal of the Bankruptcy Courts' rulings or the District Courts' rulings (it may be a bit of both, taking into account direct appeals, etc.), but in either case, whoa! Anyone have any idea what happened here? Why did the appellate courts get so mad at the lower courts in bankruptcy cases all of a sudden the year before last? I wonder if this continued in 2016. Lots of Stern reversals? Something else? Curious.

UPDATE 1/31/17: Bankruptcy statistics guru, Ed Flynn (whose fabulous work you've probably seen in the ABI Journal), helped me to understand that (1) the statistics referenced here (from Tables B-1 and B-5)  are for appeals from District Courts to Courts of Appeals, as BAP cases and District Court bankruptcy appeals are reported elsewhere (Tables BAP-1 and -2 and C-7, none of which indicates the numbers of reversals at these intermediate appeal levels), (2) the 110 merits reversals in 2015 come predominantly from the 11th Circuit and involve mostly one appellant, (3) we can probably now guess who it was and therefore what happened: Bank of America's appeals of wholly underwater second mortgage stripdown in Ch. 7  had to be granted (lower courts reversed) after the Supreme Court reversed the aberrant 11th Circuit position on allowing such stripdowns in Caulkett in mid-2015. Mystery most likely solved. Thanks, Ed!

Marblegate and a Dose of Reality for the Trust Indenture Act

posted by Jason Kilborn

The Second Circuit on Tuesday released its long-awaited opinion on the Trust Indenture Act, Marblegate v. EDMC. Several of us Slipsters have been discussing the case behind the scenes, and others will have (more intelligent) things to say about the opinion than I, but I thought I'd introduce the blockbuster case to get us rolling.

Long story short, the TIA essentially prohibits out-of-court workouts over the objection of any noteholder whose notes (debt securities) are part of the issuance qualified under the TIA. Section 316(b) says "the right of any holder of an indenture security to receive payment ... or to institute suit for the enforcement of any such payment ... shall not be impaired or affected without the consent of such holder." (emphasis added). The case was about what it means to "impair or affect" the "right" to get paid under indentured notes. The creative argument advanced by Marblegate was that lots of activities having nothing to do with changing the notes or their terms can "impair or affect" its right to get paid, and EDMC crossed the line. EDMC had done a creative end-run around the TIA by suffering its secured creditors to foreclose their (undisputed) security interests in all of its assets and then resell those assets to a newly created subsidiary of EDMC, scrubbing the former unsecured claims from those assets and leaving Marblegate and other noteholders with a claim against an empty shell. This was the second option in a Hobson's choice presented to noteholders; the first was to accept a 67% haircut and participate in a global workout with the secured creditors. Nearly 100% of the noteholders chose this option; Marblegate chose to play chicken and see if the courts would allow EDMC and its secured creditors to wipe out Marblegate's practical ability to enforce its claim by leaving an empty shell as the only obligor on Marblegate's unsecured debt after senior secured claimants exercised their superior rights in every scrap of available value. The contractual terms of Marblegate's right to collect were unchanged, but the practical ability of Marblegate to make anything of this right was clearly "impaired and affected," Marblegate argued.

Continue reading "Marblegate and a Dose of Reality for the Trust Indenture Act" »

Recommended Reading: Empire of the Fund

posted by Jason Kilborn

EmpireofthefundimageIt's that time of year again! Time to revisit and perhaps rebalance the investments in your retirement portfolio. While it is a sad fact that many people lack significant retirement savings, it is nonetheless useful for those interested in consumer finance (and investment companies, pensions, etc.) to think about how retirement savings plans work and to be able to offer some advice, for example, to debtors emerging from bankruptcy with their clean slate. William Birdthistle, of Chicago-Kent law school, has recently released Empire of the Fund, a magnificent new work on the most common vehicle that carries individuals' retirement savings in the US: mutual funds.

I have heard that Birdthistle, who teaches across town from me, is legendary in the classroom. Having read his new book, I'm not at all surprised. While his fairly esoteric subject matter made me hesitate to nominate his book in response to Katie's post, Birdthistle has really pulled one off here by managing to make a book about the structure and pitfalls of mutual funds and retirement savings ... extremely entertaining! It is masterfully written, with both erudite references to relevant comments by literary and historical figures, along with laugh-out-loud allusions to modern culture ("OMG! Friends, right! Mutual funds are lame!"). This book is an absolutely brilliant example of how to make a work on an otherwise dry financial subject not only accessible to the general public, but a real pleasure to read. It is no wonder the New York Times calls this "a lively new book."

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Proposed New EU Insolvency Directive

posted by Jason Kilborn

The European Commission has just released its proposal for another Insolvency Directive, finally tackling the very sticky issue of substantive harmonization. I had hoped the Directive would push Member States toward greater harmonization of their consumer insolvency regimes, and I even made some proposals for principles and rules for such a move, but because cross-border lending to individuals for personal consumption remains quite limited in Europe (only about 5% of total household lending), the Commission concluded that "the problem of consumers' over-indebtedness should be tackled first at national level." (p. 15)  Nonetheless, the Commission's explanatory memo heartily endorses applying the principles on discharge in this new Directive (principally, providing a full and automatic discharge after a maximum 3-year process) to all natural persons, both entrepreneurs and consumers.

As to the former, though, the proposed Directive virtually shoves European national insolvency law in the direction of US law--for better or worse. The primary thrust is to encourage a rescue climate through more robust "preventive restructuring frameworks." Read: Chapter 11. The characteristics of such frameworks include leaving the debtor in possession of its assets and affairs, staying enforcement proceedings that might interfere with restructuring negotiations, mandating disclosures for proposed restructuring plans, facilitating plan adoption by creditors in classes, including a cram-down option and an explicit absolute priority rule (pp. 30, 38, not mentioning a new value corollary ... though not using the troublesome phrase "on account of its claim" in the definition of the absolute priority rule), and protecting new (DIP) financing. The importance of institutions is highlighted, with mandates concerning the expertise and training of judges, administrators, and practitioners. A few Credit Slips contributors in particular might be interested in the Commission's comment that "It is important to gather reliable data on the performance of restructuring, insolvency and discharge procedures in order to monitor the implementation and application of this Directive." The proposal thus includes detailed rules on data to be collected using standardized templates for easy comparison of empirical results across countries.

My sense is that this proposal will face some substantial political opposition, but the Commission has an impressive track record on getting its proposals adopted by the Parliament and Council. If and when this thing is adopted, I'm sure European authorities will have no trouble finding US restructuring professionals eager to volunteer to visit Europe to provide the type of training to judges, administrators, and practitioners mandated by this Directive. Put my name on the list!

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