The 19th R3 and INSOL Europe’s International Restructuring Conference held in London on 3rd July 2025 was a magnet for restructuring and insolvency professionals with an interest in cross-border matters and all professionals interested in cross-border restructuring and insolvency. Report by Emmanuelle Inacio, INSOL Europe Chief Technical Officer.

The event - sponsored by Alph4 - that took place again at the sumptuous venue, No.11 Cavendish Square, was again sold out! 115 delegates participated enthusiastically, contributing views from a range of jurisdictions including the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, France, Luxembourg and Sweden.

The South Square barrister Toby Brown provided an update on the significant recent cross-border insolvency cases Sian Participation Corp v Halimeda International Ltd; Kireeva v Bedzhamov; Servis-Terminal LLC v Drelle; Bilta (UK) Ltd v Tradition Financial Services; and Conway & Ors v Air Arabia PJSC. This update was also the great opportunity for networking breaks!

A panel session led by John Willcock, editor of Global Turnaround, focused on the new restructuring procedures, often modelled on aspects of the US Chapter 11, that have been enacted across Europe following the transposition of the EU Directive on Restructuring and Insolvency. The INSOL Europe member Niklas Alvestrand Körling (Managing Partner of CMS Wistrand, Sweden), Antoine Laniez (Partner of CMS, Luxembourg), Patrick Schumann (Partner of King & Spalding, UK) and Sergio Vélez (Senior Managing Director of FTI Consulting, Spain) compared how these preventive restructuring procedures are developing across the continent. The EU restructuring procedures are becoming very attractive, and the UK isn’t the most creditor-friendly jurisdiction anymore…

The INSOL Europe member Sebastiaan van den Berg (Partner of RESOR, the Netherlands) provided then an analysis of restructuring valuation. The INSOL Europe member Federica Pietrogrande (Principal of The Brattle Group), Dr. Marc Broekema (Managing Director & Co-Head Netherlands Valuation Advisory, Kroll) together with Richard Bibby (Managing Director of Alvarez & Marsal) offered insight into how restructuring valuations differ across the UK, the Netherlands, and Spain. The panellists explored the role of valuation in the restructuring process, highlighting its methodologies, the importance its independence, challenges, and implications for stakeholders. 

Born in the US, Liability management exercises (LMEs) are strategies used by companies to restructure their debt obligations outside formal restructuring proceedings where conventional refinancing is not feasible. LMEs include creditors exchanging existing debt with higher priority, transferring assets to secure new financing, or creating new structural priorities among creditors. In recent years, LMEs have become increasingly sophisticated and often controversial, as they are creative ways to avoid formal restructuring proceedings within the confines of their existing financial documents. The panel leader and INSOL Europe president Alice van der Schee (Partner of Van Benthem & Keulen, the Netherlands) offered together with her panellists Ian Partridge (Partner, AlixPartners, UK); James Simpson (Director, Lazard, UK) and the INSOL Europe member Prof. Omar Salah (Partner, Norton Rose Fulbright, The Netherlands) a transatlantic perspective of the topic, highlighting that LMEs are here in Europe to stay! Therefore, LMEs should be part of the restructuring and insolvency practitioner toolkit!

The recognition of restructuring plans in Germany remains a hot topic in cross-border restructuring law and a first case is pending before German courts. International restructuring expert Prof Dr Dominik Skauradszun who is also a Judge of Appeal at the Higher Regional Court in Frankfurt together with Sebastian Böhning who is a fully qualified lawyer and doctoral candidate under the professorship of Dominik Skauradszun addressed this matter. Indeed, restructuring plans under Part 26A UK CA qualify as preventive restructuring frame works in Germany whose legislative framework does not provide a legal basis for the recognition of a sanction order in Germany.

Barret Kupelian, Chief Economist at PWC UK, gave the delegates his view on the macroeconomic and geopolitical trends shaping the restructuring landscape.
According to Barret and his research, the four main drivers of insolvency and bankruptcy in the economy are economic growth (GDP), the labour market, financial conditions and a large emphasis on uncertainty in the global economy with hot topics such as tariffs causing great doubt.

The stated aim of the new Labour government, in their first year, was meant to supercharge economic growth, but this has not really happened. It is more of a middle ground with some growth, especially in the public sector and in particular the National Health System. This is a result of the government’s policies to reduce waiting times for hospital treatment, which has a positive effect on the labour pool as more people are able to return to work in less time, thus increasing the labour pool.

General macroeconomic principals state that as vacancies in the employment market reduce, pay growth increases. This is the general picture, but not the whole market. Geographically, growth is moving from the Western world to Eastern Europe. Barret considered different scenarios of the short to medium term, each resulted in a different effect on GDP. All problems/concerns are mainly on the supply side - labour, materials, finance. John Willcock asked if the massive current investment in AI is just a bubble which will soon burst - Barret’s answer was he doesn’t know, but it will probably keep going until the ‘next big thing’ appears on the horizon.

R3 & INSOL Europe: enthusiastic networking!
Other features of the day were the enthusiastic networking and the engagement of delegates throughout the day. The President of R3 Tom Russell (Partner of James Cowper Kreston, UK) highlighted that R3 will continue to work closely with INSOL Europe – as part of its strategy - to build a wider community.

Last but not least, the President of INSOL Europe Alice van der Schee (Partner of Van Benthem & Keulen, the Netherlands) reminded that bridging regulatory and professionals is indispensable as well as bridging the UK flexibility and the EU certainty for the stakeholders protection.

R3 and INSOL Europe are already eager to run their 20th joint event next year!

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From Eugenio Vaccari, Senior Lecturer in Law, Royal Holloway University of London

Legal advice generated by Large Language Models (LLMs) may prove unsound, erroneous, or even absurd. According to a recent study, gpt-4 and other similar public models: “hallucinate at least 58% of the time, struggle to predict their own hallucinations, and often uncritically accept users’ incorrect legal assumptions.” 

To address these problems, as well as an unmet request for professional and accurate legal advice from both laypersons and professionals with limited experience in a technical and narrow area of law like insolvency law, our research group developed and tested the performance of a retrieval augmented generation (RAG) system for answering legal queries related to corporate insolvency in England and Wales. 

The Insolvency Bot we created (https://fastdatascience.com/insolvency/) relies on open-source legal information and HMRC forms to provide sound responses to a user’s query focusing on insolvency matters regulated by English law. According to a tailor-made mark scheme, we show that our Insolvency Bot consistently outperforms LLMs queried without our RAG setup, and we show that newer versions of LLMs consistently outperform older ones when queried with the Insolvency Bot’s RAG enhancements, and its data sources. 

Our legal chatbot demonstrates potential to ensure “access to justice” to affected business owners by combining a generative AI system with a trusted knowledge base. However, the system is not perfect. To improve its functionality, we are constantly updating the sources on which the system relies to provide advice on English corporate insolvency law issues. We are also exploring the possibility of extending the scope of the chatbot from corporate to personal bankruptcy matters, as these two areas are strictly linked whenever non-incorporated businesses face financial distress.

Nowadays, however, businesses, irrespective of their size, operate in an interconnected world. Business transactions between the UK and Europe, as well as within the Internal Market, are becoming increasingly common for small- and micro-enterprises. These entities, however, are ill-equipped to understand the legal complexities of cross-border insolvency disputes, should one of their clients and/or suppliers enter into a restructuring or insolvency procedure.

To address these issues, thanks to the support of INSOL Europe, we have been able to put together a working group of 14 experts across key jurisdictions in Europe to create a European Insolvency Chatbot. With this project, we aim to expand the Insolvency Bot expertise to cover cross-jurisdictional and insolvency-related queries that affect companies operating in selected European countries (France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands and Spain). The aim of the project is to expand the knowledge of our existing chatbot to cross-border European disputes by March 2026, and to present the results of our work at the 2026 INSOL Europe Academic Colloquium, as well as in an academic paper.

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Organizing auctions with the aim of selling at the highest price possible has remained a common practice since the beginning of time. While the methods of organizing auctions have changed according to the customs of the time and place, the practice is still very common in most parts of the world. An interesting fact is that people tend to have a sort of fascination with auctions and often give them symbolic meaning, writes Patricia Poulussen-Radulescu, Project Manage at CITR Romania.

That is reflected in the ways the auction is organized: from announcing the starting price, to declaring the winner. When it comes to insolvency, public tenders align perfectly within its principles and scope: maximizing asset recovery, ensuring transparency in proceedings, giving a fair treatment to creditors, selling the assets in a timely and efficient manner. In Romania, creditors can choose between methods of asset sale, from negotiation procedures to public tenders, as long as transparency over the entire process is guaranteed. But we notice that still the most common method proposed by insolvency practitioners and approved by creditors is the public tender. 

Read the full story here

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• A legal entity established with the participation of the debtor; 
• A legal entity that currently controls or has controlled the debtor within the last three years; 
• A legal or natural person that is or was controlled by the debtor within the last three years; 
• A legal entity that, together with the debtor, is or was under the control of a third party within the last three years; 
• The owners (shareholders, participants) of the debtor; 
• The CEO, management board members, chief accountant, and other executives of the debtor, including those who left their positions within three years prior to the initiation of bankruptcy proceedings; 
• Persons with whom or for whose benefit the debtor has concluded transactions for the alienation of assets that do not meet the criteria of reasonableness (economic feasibility, business purpose) and good faith; 
• A party to a fraudulent transaction made by the debtor or a transaction declared invalid under Article 42 of this Code; 
• Family members of the above-mentioned persons, including spouses, children, parents, siblings, grandchildren, and other individuals who can be reasonably considered related parties. 

• State Enterprise "Eastern Mining and Processing Plant" until January 1, 2026; 
• State-owned coal mining enterprises.