By Tomas Richter (Clifford Chance) and Adrian Thery (Garrigues)
Under EU Directive 2019/1023 promulgated in June 2019, the 27 Member States of the European Union must enact rules supporting preventive restructurings of businesses threatened by insolvency. The restructuring frameworks to be enacted are in a large part modelled after the U.S. Chapter 11 yet they are not carbon copies of it. Also, the 27 Member States have widely differing insolvency laws against whose background the preventive restructuring frameworks must operate, and significantly diverging institutions by which they will have to be applied. The implementation tasks will be both varied and formidable.
However, certain threshold questions are very similar across jurisdictions when it comes to particular topics relevant to corporate restructurings. In the context of agreeing to and adopting a restructuring plan, some of the key questions arise in relation to classification of investors’ claims and interests, grouping these claims and interests into classes, voting in the classes, and obtaining an official approval of the restructuring plan after investors have expressed their opinions on it via the voting mechanism.
The purpose of this first guidance note, published by INSOL Europe, is to flag some of the key issues that national legislators will want to consider in this particular context when implementing the restructuring frameworks prescribed by Title II of the Directive, and, at least at times, also to respectfully suggest which approaches, in the authors’ humble opinions, might perhaps be explored more productively than others.
The full article is available here.