I chaired an interesting webinar last night that features Dr John Wood from the UK and Karen Petch from New Chambers here in Sydney. We discussed the grounds upon which challenges may be made against commercial decisions of insolvency practitioners. We agreed that such actions are very difficult to succeed in because of the latitude that the courts give IPs.

One interesting point that came up was the hand’s-off approach of the UK courts is justified in part by the consideration that creditors may also exercise certain powers during insolvency, but Dr Wood pointed out that changes to insolvency procedures in 2015 and 2016 have made creditor meetings difficult to hold and this has made creditors even more disengaged. I think there are some useful points there as Australia looks at further reducing creditor meetings in the new proposed simplified liquidation procedure that was introduced into Parliament this week. A copy of the submission that I made to Treasury on these proposals is here.

Here is the video of the webinar.

I’m running 2 more insolvency webinars this month:

1. SME insolvency and restructuring (with Eddie Griffith from ABRT and Brent Kijurina from Hall Chadwick) (24 November 6pm)

2. A review of Singapore’s omnibus insolvency statute (with Aurelio Gurrea-Martínez from Singapore Management University and Paul Apathy from HSF) (25 November 6pm)