Feature

This article explores one of several issues potentially causing difficulties within the area known as “sustainable finance”. It focuses on the use of language and raises questions around the particular style of phrasing prevalent throughout the emerging taxonomies, sustainability reports, financial products and other materials which comprise the sustainable finance market. After briefly describing examples of these issues, this article advocates returning to language and grammar which is plain and simple.

Supply chain finance (SCF) is vital for EU working capital but operates within a fragmented and opaque regulatory framework. Recent high-profile failures in or otherwise affecting the SCF market have exposed critical structure weaknesses, including inconsistent private-law rules, insufficient transparency beyond securitisation and uneven operational safeguards. These issues obscure leverage, create liquidity risks and complicate cross-border enforceability, significantly impeding the Single Market.
This article advocates for a proportionate, targeted EU SCF Regulation. It proposes a framework encompassing harmonised definitions, calibrated data and disclosure standards via light-touch repositories and enhanced private-law certainty, including a uniform conflicts-of-law rule and an interoperable e-notice mechanism. These reforms would substantially improve legal certainty, transparency and market stability, ultimately lowering funding costs, increasing small and medium-sized enterprises access to finance and advancing the EU’s Savings and Investments Union objectives.

In this article, Rebecca Zaman considers lessons to be learned from the recent VietJet  litigation  for a security trustee navigating its retirement and replacement as trustee, particularly in the context of a sale or other change of control of the lending.

The UK’s capital markets are eagerly awaiting the implementation of a new private company secondary trading platform following the adoption of the final rules for the Private Intermittent Securities and Capital Exchange System (PISCES) in June 2025. In the next six months, the London Stock Exchange and potentially other operators are expected to have PISCES platforms up and running, thereby marking the debut of the first regulated market for the intermittent secondary trading of private company shares.¹ The timing seems auspicious: public listings in the UK and Europe have fallen to historic lows as private companies increasingly pursue alternative routes to liquidity.² As private markets mature and investor demand grows, the PISCES framework may unlock opportunities for private company share lending, although such arrangements raise significant questions around valuation, settlement, transfer restrictions and alignment with existing share lending market practices.

The harmonisation of the rules on prospectus liability should be put on the agenda of the Savings and Investment Union (SIU) as a matter of urgency. The International Working Group on Harmonisation of Prospectus Liability in Europe (IWGHPLE), a private group of academics and practitioners from different EU member states and beyond (led by the authors of this article), has recently drafted a concrete blueprint for uniform European prospectus liability rules. The blueprint could serve as a model for the European legislator in its efforts to overcome the current fragmentation of the EU’s legal framework. The blueprint covers all aspects pertaining to prospectus liability.

This article addresses the debate which has arisen from Lord Browne-Wilkinson’s much cited dictum that equity imposes a constructive trust on a fraudulent recipient whenever property is obtained by fraud.  It explores the rationale for the imposition of a constructive trust in the context of the underlying legal principles and considers how those principles have been approached in the key authorities. In an effort to identify a coherent rationalisation of the authorities, it then focuses on the decision in Halley v Law Society and addresses whether that decision can be reconciled with other authority, particularly the recent Supreme Court decision in Philipp v Barclays Bank UK plc .

A recent Singaporean case, Sapura Fabrication Sdn Bhd and Others v GAS and Another Appeal   [2025] SGCA 13, provides welcome guidance on when arbitral proceedings can be carved out from a domestic restructuring and insolvency process. Continuing the debate about the clash between arbitration and insolvency, Sapura  adds two new dimensions: the multi-creditor context and a sliding timescale. This article examines how best to interpret these novel elements in light of the spirit of the insolvency regime, namely facilitating the fair administration of assets according to creditors’ legal entitlements rather than a free-for-all favouring the most well-resourced and well-advised.

The decisions in Broad Idea and Wolverhampton  provide a much-needed opportunity for the courts to re-shape the grounds on which they will restrain foreign proceedings outside those cases involving jurisdiction and arbitration clauses. The article offers an outline of a new account, which covers a large part of the field, founded on the applicant’s interest in the just and efficient resolution of their dispute and a principle of protecting the English natural forum from interference.

In this first article of two, we seek to provide some background for those involved or interested in the financing of data centres, we describe what a data centre is, who uses it and some of its typical key features and hot topics. In a second article, we will consider how data centres are financed, both in the US and Europe, with a particular focus on the securitisation market.

This article examines the data protection and privacy concerns arising from the use of retail Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs), specifically in the context of a system built on a public blockchain, such as Ethereum. It examines the extent to which the risks and concerns can be minimised by building in privacy-enhancing technologies in the governance framework of the retail CBDC as set out in documents and legislative provisions explaining the operation of the digital pound and the digital euro.