International insolvency outside the EU: contract under English law and we’ll see you right.

Before the twenty-first century there was a clear and undoubted rule in international insolvency known as the Gibbs rule (Antony Gibbs & Sons v La Société Industrielle et Commerciale des Métaux (1890) 25 QBD 399). Whatever recognition or other co-operation we might be prepared to grant foreign insolvency proceedings, if an obligation was governed by English law and otherwise valid, its validity could not be affected by any act of foreign courts or authorities proceeding under their own insolvency law.

There is no doubt that this is no longer the case for EU insolvencies: the EU Insolvency Regulations of 2000 and more recently 2015 have clearly put paid to any such exceptionalism. But what of non-EU insolvencies? Since 2006 there has been some question whether the simple Gibbs rule might have been affected by the UNCITRAL-based CBIR (Cross-Border Insolvency Rules), which now give the English courts considerable scope to replicate in England the effects of a foreign insolvency proceeding in a debtor’s own COMI (centre of main interests, essentially where its business was run from). Progressive and academic opinion (the latter as usual generally aping the former) consistently suggested that the answer ought to be Yes, on the basis that modified universalism in insolvency needed to become more global and less narrowly jurisdictional.

Today, however, Hildyard J, in a careful judgment in Bakhshiyeva v Sberbank of Russia & Ors [2018] EWHC 59 (Ch), a case on the dry subject of paper issued by a Baku bank, gave the answer No. The bank, OJSC, with connections to the Azeri state, was highly insolvent. It went into Chapter 11-style reconstruction in Azerbaijan, successfully applying to have the proceeding recognised in the UK under the CBIR. A vote of an overwhelming number of creditors, valid under Azeri law, agreed a complex debt-for-government-bonds-and-new-lower-debt arrangement under which OJSC would then continue trading. Two financial institutions, one English (Templeton) and one Russian (Sberbank), holding English-law-governed debt issued by OJSC, held out. They took no part in the vote, though as a matter of Azeri law they were bound by it.

The question was, could the English court prevent these two minority creditors bloody-mindedly enforcing their rights in full against the bank once the moratorium created by the Azeri proceedings was over? As stated above, the answer was No. Whatever one might think of the Gibbs rule, it was too solidly anchored to have been removed by the side-wind of the CBIR. Nor should it be bypassed by, for example, admitting that the debt still existed but then reducing it to something like the grin on the Cheshire cat by preventing its enforcement against the assets of the debtor.

There is much to be said for Hildyard J’s solution, both on grounds of legal certainty and also because Parliament has occasionally stepped in in other areas, but not this one, to prevent abuse of international creditors’ rights (notably, in enforcing statutory debt relief for poor countries against vulture funds and the like).

It may, moreover, be important not only for bondholders — who will obviously be opening discreet magnums of champagne this evening — but for other creditors, including maritime ones. Charter claimants and bunker suppliers whose rights are governed by English law will now, it seems, be able to watch smugly from the sidelines while shipping companies go into reconstruction, waiting for the proceedings to end before pouncing, catlike, on the very same companies, seizing their London accounts and arresting their vessels for the full amount of their claim as soon as they venture far from home. Commerce red in tooth and claw, you might say: but then that’s how it’s always been in shipping.