By Benjamin Liu (University of Auckland Business School)
The exit consent technique refers to an offer by a bond issuer to all the bondholders to exchange the existing bonds for new bonds or other types of securities, on the condition that the tendering bondholders consent to a resolution to amend the terms of the existing bonds to make them less valuable.
In Marblegate and Caesars, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York held that the relevant exit consent in each case violated Section 316(b) of the Trust Indenture Act of 1939, reasoning that Section 316(b) prohibits not only impairment of a dissenting bondholder’s formal right to payment, but also “practical impairment” of such right. This article argues that there is no sufficient justification for giving Section 316(b) a broader interpretation than its plain language suggests. Such an interpretation is inconsistent with the legislative history of Section 316(b) and how the term “impairment of a right” is used in other contexts. In January 2017, in a 2–1 decision, the Second Circuit reversed the district court’s ruling in Marblegate, holding that Section 316(b) prohibits only non-consensual amendments to an indenture’s core payment terms.
In Assenagon, the U.K. High Court held that the exit consent arrangement in that case was unlawful because it breached the abuse principle under English law. This article argues that the application of the abuse principle in exit consent cases should be considered in light of the facts and the parties’ presumed intention. A consenting bondholder does not abuse its power when it is simply making a rational choice. Furthermore, it cannot possibly be the parties’ presumed intention that, when the issuer has made an exchange offer coupled with an exit consent, the consenting bondholder is required to prioritize the interests of the dissenting bondholders over its own interest.
The full article is available here.
For past Roundtable posts on exit consents and related issues, see the Roundtable’s round up of reactions to the recent Marblegate decision; our post covering a white paper by twenty-eight law firms on debt restructurings and the TIA; and Roe, “Fixing the Trust Indenture Act to Allow Restructuring Votes.”