Credit Slips/IACCL

The End of Bankruptcy

“Bob Rasmussen, call the Chapter 11 Desk.” Two recent decisions, one on each side of the Atlantic, have enshrined contract bankruptcy—or at least the defeat of bankruptcy law by contract.  Although the context for both was international, in principle they could work for domestic cases as well and at last achieve the demise of bankruptcy law proclaimed in the above-titled 2002 article by Rasmussen and Douglas Baird. The analysis is complex, so this brief note will focus on results and implications.

The cases are Bakhshiyeva in London [Bakhshiyeva -and- Sberbank of Russia, et al., [2018] EWHC 59 (Ch).] and Sun Edison in Manhattan [In re SunEdison, 577 B.R. 120 (2017). Their common ground is that a choice of law clause in a contract may trump the applicability of bankruptcy law to that contract. In the hands of any competent lawyer, the result may be party autonomy in the application of bankruptcy law to contractual obligations, making bankruptcy law largely irrelevant.

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An important opinion by one of our most knowledgeable bankruptcy judges, Judge Bernstein in Manhattan, may have reached the right result by the wrong path in deciding if a foreign debtor’s Chapter 7 trustee can avoid a foreign transfer to a foreign creditor. In re Ampal-American Israel Corp., 562 B.R. 601 (2017) (Ampal). Because the opinion’s reasoning may seriously weaken section 547 of the Bankruptcy Code, it is worth imposing on the reader’s time for a brief analysis.

Ampal, a corporation organized in the United States but operated in Israel, filed a Chapter 11 case that was converted to Chapter 7. The trustee sought to recover a preference paid through a bank in Israel to its Tel Aviv law firm. The company’s only substantial business connection with the United States was its listing on NASDAQ. The court held that section 547 of the Bankruptcy Code did not apply, which was very likely correct. (The trustee apparently did not seek to apply Israeli law.)

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There can be little doubt Nortel wins the title for the cross-border insolvency case of the young century. Not only is it a huge case (US$7B or so), but as I noted in my last post it has established several milestones, including a joint televised trial in Toronto and New York and a common result in the two courts. Even more important are the substantive results in the universalist mode: the initial agreement on a global sale of assets without reference to territorial or corporate boundaries and the new ruling that orders global distribution on a quasi pro rata basis. The ruling is also notable for what it is not. It is not an acceptance of substantive consolidation. It is not territorialist; the result was unrelated to the situs of assets or creditors. It is also not fully universalist, although it does represent a species of modified universalism.

The key to the global distribution ruling, discussed below, is a finding that ownership of the sold assets could not be attributed to any one corporation in the corporate group and thus the proceeds should be distributed globally. I refer the reader to the opinions for the details, especially paragraph 250 of Judge Newburgh’s opinion. In summary, the proceeds of the sales are distributed pro rata among the estates. That result differs from a pure pro rata among all creditors of the corporate group primarily for three reasons. First, some cash stays in place. Second, intra-group claims share in the distribution from each estate, including an established $2B claim by the US sub against the Canadian parent. Third, an intra-group guarantee is potentially recognized.

The fundamental issue presented was entitlement to the proceeds of the sale of various assets. The first step necessarily was to determine ownership of those assets, primarily IP. The two judges agreed that the highly integrated nature of Nortel made it impossible to arrive at a fair and accurate determination of ownership within the Nortel group. By contrast, they obviously felt that the intra-group claim ($2B) against the parent and the parent’s guarantees were firmly attached to the US sub. No doubt they were also keenly aware of the Third Circuit precedent limiting substantive consolidation. Given a decision to avoid a result equivalent to substantive consolidation, and therefore to honor the corporate form as to claims, they were stuck with the problem of allocating the sale proceeds, a problem that substantive consolidation would have enabled them to avoid as discussed below.

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Per Part 1 of this post, the word “executory” under section 365 of the Bankruptcy Code should be defined by its original, common law meaning per Williston: a contract in which some obligations remain. That common law definition was the one on the table when Congress originally adopted this ancient provision and there is no longer any justification for imposing the labyrinthine elements of executoriness on top of it. These additional executoriness requirements were developed by the courts in the olden days when court approval of AorR was not required and executoriness was a way to protect estates from trustee foolishness or carelessness. (See my old article for details at A Functional Analysis of Executory Contracts, 74 Minn. L. Rev. 227 (1989).)  During that time, the Countryman test did a brilliant job in greatly improving the policing of those failures. However, the Countryman test is not needed for that purpose now that court approval is required for AorR. It also does not solve the underlying problem, which is manipulation of the label “executory” in lieu of applying the statute as written to cover modern problems like options and licenses. The result is confusion and unpredictable injustice to estate and counterparty alike.

Under the form of Functional Analysis that I have suggested, the basic approach to AorR is taken from the words of the statute and is simplicity itself:

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Warning: Grumpy Alert. I am grumpy because the ABI Commission’s recent report rejected any reform of the bizarre American approach to executory contracts, which requires a quality of “executoriness” in a contract before it can be assumed or rejected. (Think of Stephen Colbert and “truthiness.”) Worse still, it recommended codifying the Countryman test, which was a great advance in its day but has been rendered hopelessly outdated by statutory changes and modern contract practices—e.g. in options and LLC memberships.

One reason for the Commission’s recommendation was “the perceived value in maintaining some type of gating feature to vet those contracts that a debtor in possession could assume, assign, or reject in the chapter 11 case.” A reasonable conclusion from that would be that the reason for retaining the old test was that continued confusion and inconsistency would help counterparties to maneuver in the fog. But no. The Report explains that the case law is so predictable that eliminating executoriness would just create more litigation. For those who have recently reviewed that case law, I can only assure you I am not making this up. (Please note I don’t for a moment blame this error of the Commission majority on its excellent reporter.)

Some twenty-five years ago I was guilty of an article on this subject called A Functional Analysis of Executory Contracts. Unfortunately, some cases used the phrase to mean that executoriness should depend on benefit to the debtor, while my pitch was to abolish the executoriness requirement altogether. Herewith a brief reprise of that old article and perhaps an intimation of a new one.

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