This article introduces the policy debate as regards a further reduction of the settlement cycle. The US has moved to T+1 in May 2024, with the UK and EU making plans to follow suit.
28 June 2024Paul Marshall offers a clarification and correction to two parts of his recent article of the above title.
28 June 2024The Treasury has announced its intention to amend the Payment Services Regulations 2017 (PSR). As a means of combatting authorised push payment (APP) fraud, banks will be given the power to delay the transferring of funds where they have established that there are reasonable grounds to suspect that the payment order has been placed subsequent to fraud or dishonesty. When utilising this discretion, they must inform their customer, who can then decide whether to rescind their instruction. Although the new power may prevent many instances of fraud, it is not without its problems, and this article discusses six sets of issues.
28 June 2024Trades on the secondary debt market typically go wrong because the lender is unable to settle the trade satisfactorily. In this article Matthew Watson considers the circumstances in which a selling lender may be unable to settle a trade and the position of the buyer in that event.
28 June 2024There has been considerable interest in the recent ruling of the High Court in Ion Science Ltd v Persons Unknown (unreported, 21 December 2020)1 as the first in which an English court has considered the question of situs in respect of a Bitcoin. Long described as an “intractable question”, many have taken the case to stand potentially for the proposition that the situs of a cryptoasset is the place where its owner is domiciled.
13 June 2024COVID-19 has fundamentally altered how companies are able to hold meetings of their shareholders and creditors. This article explores how the courts have dealt with these disruptions in the context of schemes of arrangement under Pt 26 of the Companies Act 2006, and under the new restructuring plan regime under Pt 26A of the Companies Act 2006. It demonstrates that the courts have adopted a flexible approach, enabling meetings to be held even where members or creditors cannot physically come together due to social distancing restrictions.
13 June 2024This article considers the new provisions in the Corporate Insolvency and Governance Act 2020 (CIGA) on so-called ipso facto clauses and how those provisions interact with cross-border contracts.
13 June 2024Credit to leveraged companies normally ties to the cash flow of the borrower’s business. But the coronavirus pandemic has wreaked havoc on the financial standing of many borrowers, upending their ability to predict cash flows and prompting them to raise capital against hard assets’ liquidation value. In the process, new transaction structures have emerged that use collateral more creatively to maximise borrowing capacity.
13 June 2024On 11 August 2020, Citibank made a payment of US$900m to the lenders under a syndicated loan agreement, in what the US court later described as “one of the biggest blunders in banking history”. When Citibank sued for the return of the money, the US court held that it was not entitled to repayment because the payments discharged an existing debt and the recipients had no notice of the mistake. That decision, on 16 February 2021, has understandably caused consternation among bankers. One report described the decision as “eye-watering” and one that “will strike terror into earnest hearts in the global trust and agency community”. London, of course, is another global financial hub and the industry might be equally interested to know how this dispute might have been determined as a matter of English law. This article addresses that question.
13 June 2024In 2020, a US court determined that minority noteholders’ rights to receive principal and interest on their notes survived a “strict foreclosure” and cancellation of notes, undertaken by the indenture trustee at the direction of a majority of noteholders. In this article, we consider the potential effect of that decision on out-of-court, majority-led share pledge enforcements, which are a key debt-restructuring tool in the European market.
13 June 2024