On October 26, 2023, the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 (the Act) became law in the UK. The Act is part of the UK government’s effort to tackle economic crime. In the following guest post, Francis Kean, Partner in the Financial Lines Team at McGill and Partners, takes a look at the SFO’s new investigative powers under the Act and considers their implications for corporate executives. A version of this article previously was published in the Governance and Compliance Magazine. I would like to thank Francis for allowing me to publish his article as a guest post on this site. I welcome guest post submissions from responsible authors on topics of interest to this site’s readers. Please contact me directly if you would like to submit a guest post. Here is Francis’s article.Continue Reading Guest Post: The Personal Liability Implications for Directors of the SFO’s New Investigatory Powers
A recurring issue concerning directors’ duties is the question whether or not directors have duties to their company’s creditors when the company is in the “zone of insolvency.” In an interesting recent decision, the U.K. Supreme Court addressed the duty of directors to creditors when their company becomes insolvent or when it approaches or is at risk of insolvency. In a case in which it decided that the directors for the company before the Court were not liable, the Court ruled that the creditor duty may arise not only when the company is insolvent but when it is “bordering on insolvency,” though the creditor duty does not become paramount until insolvency is “inevitable.” The Court’s October 5, 2022 decision in BTI 204 LLC v. Sequana SA can be found 