Cross-border recognition of English restructuring plans

The introduction of the restructuring plan under the UK Corporate Insolvency and Governance Act 2020 was a landmark moment. The new tool has already proved to be a powerful restructuring process and a welcome addition to the existing restructuring toolkit. However, in order to be an effective restructuring tool, it is essential that the restructuring plan is capable of being recognised in the relevant jurisdictions to which the debtor has a significant connection.

With the government's recent Corporate Insolvency and Governance Act 2020 - Interim Report raising the idea of expressly legislating that (as a matter of English law) a restructuring plan has extra-territorial effect, we wanted to share some recent articles and thought leadership pieces we have prepared on the topic of cross-border recognition of restructuring plans (and insolvency and restructuring proceedings more generally).

The first article considers the cross-border aspects of the Virgin Active restructuring. The restructuring involved obtaining recognition advice in Spain, Portugal, Italy, Singapore and Australia. It was the first restructuring plan to compromise obligations governed by the laws of an EU member state following the expiry of the Brexit transition arrangements. This article was recently published in the Q2 2022 edition of INSOL World, the Quarterly Journal of INSOL International (a leading international industry body).

The second article, written by Philip Wells and Lucy Aconley, provides a more general overview of the routes to obtain recognition of insolvency and restructuring proceedings (both from an outbound and inbound perspective). This article was initially published in the March 2021 edition of Butterworths Journal of International Banking and Financial Law and has been updated and republished in the April 2022 edition of Zeitschrift für das gesamte Insolvenzrecht (a leading German insolvency journal).