I think it’s great that summaries of court decisions are more freely-available now than ever before.  I’ve wondered whether I should just drift back into the shadows and leave it to the pros… but then I remember that, even if no one reads them, authoring my own summaries helps get them fixed in my own mind.  Therefore, I shall continue:

• Sands v Layne – should the court consider all creditors’ interests when considering whether to dismiss a petition because the debtor has reached an agreement with the petitioner alone?
• Re Business Environment Fleet Street – as statute allows an administrator to take control of property to which he thinks the company is entitled, can he sell it?
• Parkwell Investments v HMRC – should provisional liquidators be appointed if there is a tax assessment appeal outstanding?
• Bear Scotland v Fulton – should non-guaranteed overtime be included in holiday pay?
• Connaught Income Fund v Capita Financial Managers – does a liquidator have a statutory power to get in post-appointment assets?
• Day v Tiuta International – if the charge under which receivers are appointed is invalid, can they remain in office by reason of the appointor’s subrogated rights under another charge?

Trustee fails to overturn a debtor’s deal with the petitioner

Sands v Layne & Anor (12 November 2014) ([2014] EWHC 3665 (Ch))http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Ch/2014/3665.html

Mr Layne originally sought to avoid bankruptcy by offering security over his home and payment by instalments to the petitioning creditor.  However, given the time that the debtor would have needed to pay off the debt, the judge rejected his defence that the creditor had unreasonably refused the offer and made a bankruptcy order in July 2011.  In June 2012, the parties came to an agreement as regards payment and security and, by means of a consent order, the bankruptcy order was set aside.  In June 2013, the Trustee in Bankruptcy applied for the consent order to be rescinded pursuant to S375 of the IA86, the thrust of his submission being that the debtor and creditor had sought to deal with the matter between themselves without taking into account any obligations to him or to other unsecured creditors.

The deputy judge expressed a wavering view over the conclusion leading from the decision in Appleyard v Wewelwala that S375 reviews and rescissions by first instance courts can deal with only decisions made by those courts, not also decisions emanating from appellate courts, and thus the Trustee’s application failed.  However, given the deputy judge’s “diffidence”, he considered further questions arising from the application.

How should the interests of other unsecured creditors impact on the court’s consideration of whether a petition should be dismissed under S271(3)(a), i.e. where “the debtor has made an offer to secure or compound for” the petition debt?  The deputy judge concluded that, as the first ground for dismissal under S271 involves the court being satisfied that the debtor is able to pay all his debts, “the second ground – involving an offer to secure or compound – must therefore be intended to apply even where the debtor is not so able” (paragraph 20).

The deputy judge listed the other unsecured creditors’ potential remedies, including seeking to be substituted as petitioner and challenging the security as a preference (albeit that they would need to establish a desire to prefer the original petitioner).  “In short, in so far as other unsecured creditors may be affected by the provision of the security to the petitioner, the statute provides a targeted remedy in what it considers suitable cases, and it is neither necessary nor appropriate for their interests to be addressed in the context of the bilateral dispute between the petitioning creditor and the debtor and in particular the issue whether, where security is offered and rejected, a bankruptcy order should be made or refused” (paragraph 22).

The deputy judge also observed that the Trustee’s argument “suffered from a serious dose of circularity” (paragraph 24) in that the Trustee could not have been joined as a respondent to the original appeal, which “was to decide whether the bankruptcy order should stand. If the order fell and there was no bankruptcy, all consequences dependent on it – the trusteeship and the vesting – disappeared with it” and thus he had no standing to bring the application in the first place.

Moon Beever published an article examining the role of the Trustee as illustrated by this decision: http://goo.gl/Fu62LU.

 

Court rejects Administrators’ attempts to sell third party assets

Re Business Environment Fleet Street Limited; Edwards & Anor v Business Environment Limited & Ors (28 October 2014) ([2014] EWHC 3540 (Ch))http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Ch/2014/3540.html

Administrators applied under Para 72 of Schedule B1 for leave to dispose of assets, including properties subject to subleases and equipment located at the properties, which one of the respondents claimed to own.  Under Para 72, the court can authorise administrators to dispose of “goods which are in the possession of the company under a hire-purchase agreement”, which under Para 111 extends to chattel leasing agreements.

The deputy judge examined the agreement between the Company and the respondent and concluded that the Company had not been granted possession of the assets, which remained either with the respondent or had transferred to the subtenants.  Thus, the agreement did not comprise a chattel leasing agreement, as it did not involve the bailment of goods.

The Administrators pursued an alternative ground, arguing that Paras 67 and 68 combined entitled them to manage – which would include disposal of – property to which they think the Company is entitled.  The deputy judge rejected the argument that “property” in the two paragraphs has the same meaning: it may be appropriate for an administrator to take control of assets in a hurry on his appointment, but disposal would be a step too far.  “It would confer an exorbitant jurisdiction on the administrator to convert property belonging to third parties, simply because this happened to be desirable on the balance of convenience” (paragraph 19.3).  The deputy judge also saw no support in S234, which relieves an administrator from liability for converting third party assets where he acted reasonably.

But what if the sale sought by the Administrators appeared to make sense commercially?  The Administrators’ case here was that there was considerable “marriage” value in disposing of the assets together with the properties, enhancing the purchase price by some £7m.  In this particular case, the deputy judge saw the marriage value in the proposed sale, but did not see that a delay in a sale would be detrimental and thus was not satisfied that the balance of convenience lay in ordering an immediate sale (even if he had been satisfied that the court had jurisdiction to order it).

For an alternative – and far more authoritative – analysis, you might like to read the article by Stephen Atherton QC (via Lexis Nexis) at http://goo.gl/VYFblM.

 

Attempts to “see-saw” between courts does not avoid the appointment of provisional liquidators

Parkwell Investments Limited v Wilson & HMRC (16 October 2014) ([2014] EWHC 3381 (Ch))http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Ch/2014/3381.html

This case has received some attention due to the judge’s statement that he was unable to accept the reasoning of the deputy judge in Enta Technologies Limited v HMRC (http://wp.me/p2FU2Z-6W), which if it were correct would lead to a “very undesirable consequence… namely the inability of the court to appoint anyone a provisional liquidator to a company where the company has an outstanding appeal against the assessment” (paragraph 21).

In this case, the Company had applied for the termination of the provisional liquidation and the dismissal of HMRC’s winding-up petition on the basis that the First Tax Tribunal was the place to determine its VAT position and that, as there were appeals against assessments still outstanding, it was inappropriate that the Companies Court should pre-empt the process by appointing a provisional liquidator.  Sir William Blackburne stated: “There is to my mind something highly artificial in the notion that this court has jurisdiction to entertain a winding-up petition brought by HMRC against a company founded on the non-payment of a VAT assessment… for so long as the company has taken no steps to appeal the assessment to the FTT… only to find that that jurisdiction is lost the moment the company files its notice of appeal to the tribunal or, if not lost, is no longer exercisable, irrespective of the merits of the appeal…   I cannot think that this approach is right. Jurisdiction in this court cannot arise and disappear (or be exercisable and then suddenly cease to be) in this see-saw fashion” (paragraphs 19 and 20).

The judge believed that the true question was whether the appeal to the FTT has any merit. If it has none, then the assessment continues to constitute a basis for a winding-up petition.  However, “if the court, on a review of the evidence before it, considers that the company has a good arguable appeal which will lead either to the cancellation of the assessment or to its reduction to below the winding-up debt threshold, it will dismiss the petition” (paragraph 20).  In this case, the judge concluded that the Company had failed to produce sufficient evidence to demonstrate a good arguable case and thus the provisional liquidator was allowed to continue in office.

For a more practical look at the implications of this decision, you might like to look at an article by Mike Pavitt, Paris Smith LLP, at http://goo.gl/0lZyrO.

 

Holiday pay to include non-guaranteed compulsory overtime

Bear Scotland Limited & Ors v Fulton & Ors (4 November 2014) (UKEATS/0047/13) (heard with Hertel (UK) Limited v Woods & Ors and Amec Group Limited v Law & Ors (UKEAT/0161/14)http://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKEAT/2014/0047_13_0411.html

None of these cases involved insolvencies, but I can see how their impact on holiday pay calculations could have consequences for IPs.  However, permission to appeal has been granted and the government has set up a taskforce to assess the possible impact of this decision (see http://goo.gl/8jmV53).

The conclusions of the Companies’ appeals against several elements of previous tribunal decisions were as follows:

1. Normal remuneration – in relation to which holiday pay is calculated –included overtime that employees were required to work, even though the employer was not obliged to offer it as a minimum.
2. An employer’s failure to pay holiday pay on this basis could be claimed as unlawful deductions from pay under the ERA1996, but not where a period of more than three months had elapsed between each such unlawful deduction (i.e., I think, if, say, holiday was paid short in March, August, and October of this year, only August and October could be claimed; March would not be able to be claimed, as it occurred more than three months before the August short payment).
3. Pay in lieu of notice is not required to be calculated under the same basis, i.e. it does not include the overtime described in (1) above. This differs from the position as regards holiday pay, because it was felt that the parties’ view of what hours were “normal” at the time the contract was entered into would not have been informed by the experience of working under that contract, which described overtime as not guaranteed and not forming part of normal working hours.
4. In two of the cases concerned, time spent travelling to work (which was paid during working times as a Radius Allowance and Travelling Time Payment) also fell within “normal remuneration” for the purpose of calculating holiday pay.

There has been some comment (e.g. Moon Beever’s article at http://goo.gl/Etay9A) that overtime other than compulsory overtime is also likely to be comprised in “normal remuneration”.  Whilst this was not dealt with by the Appeal Tribunal, the judge did highlight the principle that “‘normal pay’ is that which is normally received” (paragraph 44) and thus I can see why that conclusion might be drawn.

 

A liquidator’s power to get in post-appointment assets

The Connaught Income Fund, Series 1 v Capita Financial Managers Limited (5 November 2014) ([2014] EWHC 3619 (Comm))http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/Comm/2014/3619.html

The key points – and quotes – that I’d extracted from the judgment were the same as those highlighted by Pinsent Masons (http://goo.gl/QU8o9i).

The liquidators of the Fund (which was an unregulated collective investment scheme set up as a limited partnership) took an assignment of the investors’ claims, but these were resisted under a number of arguments including a challenge that the liquidators acted outside their statutory powers in taking the assignments.

The judge decided that the assignments were allowed under the liquidators’ Schedule 4 power “to do all such things as may be necessary for winding up the company’s affairs and distributing its assets”, including those that had not been assets of the partnership when it traded.

 

Receivers’ appointment sound notwithstanding that their appointor’s charge could be invalid

Day v Tiuta International Limited & Ors (30 September 2014) ([2014] EWCA Civ 1246)http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2014/1246.html

This is a complicated case, which I think has been successfully summarised by Taylor Wessing LLP (http://goo.gl/YhN2ga).

Tiuta International Limited (“TIL”) agreed to lend money to Day to enable him to repay a loan provided by Standard Chartered (“SC”) and to discharge the charge to SC.  Later, due to Day’s non-payment, TIL appointed receivers under the powers of its new charge, but Day claimed damages against TIL that, if set off against the loan, would release TIL’s charge and invalidate the receivers’ appointment.  TIL argued that, even if Day were successful in escaping from its charge, TIL was still entitled to appoint receivers because it was subrogated to the SC charge by reason of its payment settling SC’s loan and charge.  Day contended that, even if this were so, TIL would need to appoint receivers again but this time in express reliance on the SC charge.

Lady Justice Gloster stated: “it is important to bear in mind that the correct analysis of the right of subrogation is that a party who discharges a creditor’s security interest and who is regarded as having acquired that interest by subrogation, does not actually acquire the creditor’s interest, but rather obtains a new and independent equitable security interest which prima facie replicates the creditor’s old interest. Subrogation does not effect an actual assignment of the discharged creditor’s rights to the subrogated creditor. What subrogation means in this context is that the subrogated creditor’s legal relations with a defendant, who would otherwise be unjustly enriched, are regulated as if the benefit of the charge had been assigned to him” (paragraph 43).

“Thus whilst TIL did not purport to rely on the SC Charge when appointing the Receivers… and purported to rely only on the TIL Charge to make the appointment, that in my judgment was immaterial…  Subrogation is a means by which the court regulates the legal relationships between parties in order to avoid unjust enrichment and the precise manner in which it operates may vary according to the circumstances of the case. In the present case, on the hypothesis that the TIL Charge was voidable, the doctrine of subrogation, in conferring a new equitable proprietary right on TIL, would have operated to entitle TIL to the notional benefit of the SC Charge for the purposes of securing repayment of the TIL Loan made under the terms of the TIL Loan Facility” (paragraph 44).  She continued that TIL was not required to follow the payment demand process as required by the SC charge, which would be “nonsensical” since SC’s liabilities had been discharged, but it was entitled to follow the process set down in the TIL loan facility and charge leading to the appointment of receivers.