Restructuring

Contributed by Arnold Buessemaker, Sally Willcock, Anne-Sophie Noury and Michele Meises
We are pleased to include as today’s Bankruptcy Blog post a link to the Weil Comparative Guide to Restructuring Procedures.  This new publication is the product of collaboration between colleagues in Weil’s New York, London, Paris and Munich restructuring practices.  The Guide compares the restructuring procedures in each of England, France and Germany with chapter 11 of the US Bankruptcy Code.  We have chosen US chapter 11 as the comparative reference restructuring procedure in view of its potential to be far reaching in scope and because of the particular influence which US chapter 11 continues to have on the on-going development of restructuring laws world-wide.
The Guide includes a short section on the European Insolvency Regulation, which is the mandatory legislation in force in each of the European Union’s 27 member States (except for Denmark) and which sets out rules which allocate jurisdiction and applicable insolvency law for entities headquartered within the European Union.
Amongst the subjects covered in the guide for each jurisdiction are:

• The qualifying criteria and jurisdictional thresholds which apply to each of the restructuring procedures available in each jurisdiction
• Directors’ duties and mandatory filing requirements
• Key procedural stages
• Scope of automatic stay or equivalents
• Affect of the opening of proceedings on contracts
• Voting thresholds and cramdown availability
• Pre-packaged and pre-negotiated restructurings and accelerated procedures
• Financing restructurings and the available of super-priority finance.

The English law comparative section of the Guide covers schemes of arrangement as well as administrations and voluntary arrangements.  The French law comparative focuses largely on sauvegarde proceedings and the judicial administration procedure ‘redressement judiciaire’.  It also includes commentary on the Accelerated Financial Sauvegarde Procedure implemented in France in March 2011.  The German section of the Guide includes commentary on important changes to German restructuring procedures which took effect on 1 March 2012, known as the ‘Gesetz zur weiteren Erleichterung der Sanierung von Unternehmen’ and commonly known as the ESUG reform.