The D&O Diary’s European sojourn continued this week with a stop in London. Fortunately, the beautiful weather we enjoyed in Paris followed us to London, where blue skies and warm sunshine prevailed throughout our visit. It was only a brief stop for us in London before heading on to other destinations, but it was still a great visit.Continue Reading London in June
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 here. The Press Summary of the Court’s Judgement can be found here.
Continue Reading U.K. Supreme Court Addresses Directors’ Duties for Companies “Bordering on Insolvency”
One of the questions for companies facing financial difficulties both in the U.S. and in the UK is the extent to which the boards of the companies owe duties to creditors to try to avoid creditors’ losses as the companies approach insolvency. I discussed the state of the law in Delaware regarding these issues in a recent post. In the following guest post, Francis Kean, a partner in the financial lines team at McGill and Partners, takes a look at the recent suspension in the UK of “wrongful trading’ legislation A version of Francis’s article previously was published on LinkedIn. I would like to thank Francis for allowing me to publish his article as a guest post on my site. I welcome guest post submissions from responsible authors on topics of interest to this blog’s readers. Please contact me directly of you would like to submit a guest post. Here is Francis’s article.
Continue Reading Guest Post: UK’s Wrongful Trading Laws Suspended: Good News for Company Directors?