Alastair Beveridge
President of
INSOL Europe

We are pleased to announce that registration is now open for our EECC Conference, taking place in Ljubljana (Slovenia), a land of legends and myths, from 6-7 June 2019. The main them of the conference is "Navigating The Journey of Distressed Companies".

Slovenia had a high number of insolvent companies as a result of the 2008 global financial crisis, features of restructuring procedures not suited and no preventive procedures available. In the last couple of years, Slovenia introduced preventive restructuring procedures for medium and large-size companies, simplified reorganization procedures for micro and small-size companies and improved access to reorganization proceedings for creditors.

These reforms increased the number of successful reorganization cases and ranked Slovenia as number 9 at Resolving Insolvency (World Bank Doing Business Report 2019), with an 88.7 cents on the dollar recovery rate, 0.8 years and 4% of the estate cost. Slovenia is the perfect place for our 15th EECC Conference!

Download the brochure
or register your place here.

For further details or to register your place, please visit our Events website.

The Academic Forum has just issued a Call for Papers for the Copenhagen 2019 Conference taking place on Wednesday 25 September – Thursday 26 September 2019. The overall conference theme will be “Harmonisation of insolvency and restructuring laws in the EU”. The theme encompasses issues relevant to the three pillars of the new EU insolvency and restructuring directive: (1) preventive restructuring frameworks, (ii) second chance, and (iii) efficiency of restructuring, insolvency and discharge procedures.

Proposals for the delivery of papers are now invited that challenge existing approaches, stimulate debate and ask profound questions. Younger Academics are, of course, also invited to submit papers and may also choose to present their research in the conference session dedicated to the Young Academics’ Network in Insolvency Law (YANIL).

Expressions of interest in delivering papers within the conference theme should be communicated by 15 March 2019 by email to Anthon Verweij, IEAF Secretary. For further information on the conference themes and topics as well as on the travel grants available for early scholars, please visit the Academic Forum website.

A highly successful second annual meeting of the joint INSOL International / INSOL Europe Financiers Group took place in London on 20 November, chaired by John Willcock, Editor of Global Turnaround, author of this report.

The stimulating discussion was hosted by Commonwealth Bank of Australia, whose Mark Sutton, Senior Executive Manager, Group Credit Structuring, opened the proceedings. The panel was then introduced by Derek Sach, chair of the INSOL International Financiers Group. 

The theme was the package of measures floated by UK regulators in response to a number of controversial business collapses recently, including the retail group BHS and the outsourcing giant Carillion.

The suggested responses include strengthening corporate governance pre-insolvency, and potential new powers to investigate and pursue directors over companies that have been sold or dissolved. 

This prompted two strands of discussion; given these changes, who would want to be a director? And more generally, who should play the role of ringmaster in the kind of complex restructurings now being seen with multinational companies boasting increasingly complicated capital structures? 

The panel consisted of Patricia Godfrey, a partner in the banking and finance team at CMS; Andrew Shaw, a civil servant in the UK’s Insolvency Service who currently heads its team preparing for Brexit; Ed Boyle, a restructuring and insolvency partner with KPMG; Julian Verden, Stemcor Group’s managing director for Europe; and Richard Stables, EMEA head of restructuring at Lazard. 

The debate was brought to a conclusion by Alastair Beveridge of AlixPartners, past Co-Chair of the INSOL Europe Financiers Group, and the joint group now looks forward to a similar event next year.

The recent amendment to the Hungarian Insolvency Act (HIA), which entered into force in July 2018, concerned a seemingly minor issue.

The newly implemented provision, section 26(3b) of the HIA, makes it possible to terminate the liquidation proceedings even after the delivery of the final decision opening of the liquidation proceedings (but prior to the publication of the liquidation in the Official Gazette) without the consent of the creditor who initiated the liquidation proceedings.

The precondition of such “extraordinary termination” is that the debtor provides proof of having paid the debt underlying the final court decision opening liquidation to the creditor. Zoltán Fabók, Counsel, DLA Piper Budapest and Fellow, INSOL Global Insolvency Practice Course, takes up the story which has provoked strong responses even in the “mainstream” media. Read the full Inside Story and other articles here.

If you would like the opportunity to have your Inside Story published in a future edition, please email Communications Manager, Paul Newson for details.

The INSOL Europe High-Level Course on Insolvency is an ambitious training project that for its second edition, is being held in Nicosia (Cyprus), both for the importance of the jurisdiction's legal tradition and for its recent reforms in the insolvency area.

Approx. 80 participants have now completed the first two modules and are preparing for Module III, in which each participant will be required to choose a topic of analysis, and submit an essay of about 5,000 words on the subject.

The new date for the final coure is now Friday 22 March and more information can be found on the Education pages of our website.

The Winter 2018/2019 edition of Eurofenix, our quartlery printed journal, has now been published and sent to all our members.

Members can also download the latest edition on our website, and non-members can access older editions through the same portal.

Eurofenix is essential reading for INSOL Europe members, licensed insolvency practitioners and all professionals involved in business recovery throughout Europe. The new edition includes news and updates from around Europe, including conference reports, feature articles, book reviews and country reports. 

If you would like to contribute to a future edition, please visit our website for information about copy deadlines and submission guidelines.

Dear members of the Anti-Fraud Forum