Shortly after New Year 2018, Hildyard J decided that when an Azeri bank went bust and was put into reconstruction in Baku, the Azeri administrator could not use the Cross-Border Insolvency Regulation to freeze out a couple of creditors in England and Russia whose bond debts were governed by English law. They had refused to have anything to do with the reconstruction, smugly sat back and waited for the reconstruction to finish, knowing that the bank still had English assets that could potentially be seized. (See our blogpost here).
The Court of Appeal has now agreed, in Bakhshiyeva (Foreign Representative of the Ojsc International Bank of Azerbaijan) v Sberbank of Russia & Ors [2018] EWCA Civ 2802 (18 December 2018) . It might or might not be a good idea for England to adopt modified universalism in insolvency and accept, in essence, that the law of a corporation’s home jurisdiction should be controlling in all questions of the enforceability of obligations against it, wherever situated and whatever the law governing them. Indeed, it does just this in EU insolvencies, courtesy of the EUInsolvency Regulation 2015. But established common law authority said that an English court would ignore laws cancelling debts that did not emanate from the state whose law governed them. Further, the CBIR was best read as legislation with procedural, not substantive, aims. It would suspend enforcement of obligations while the reconstruction was going ahead, but would not actually destroy them. Any attempt to use a foreign reconstruction for anything more than that would not be countenanced.
Whether this is the last word we will see. There may be an appeal to the Supremes: the two creditors clearly have the money, and quite a lot rides on the result. However, the view of this blog, for what it is worth, is that this is a delicate matter best left to careful legislative reform, if indeed reform is needed at all. And that’s a bigger if than it looks. Money-men aren’t popular these days, but there is something to be said for the position of the two creditors. No-one has to issue English-law bonds, nor to leave assets in England that can be seized to support the obligations contained in them. And, one strongly suspects, the interest rate on the English-law debt was lower than on Azeri-law debt precisely because of the perceived lower solvency risk. The ability to take the benefit of this and then tell foreign creditors to go fish isn’t, perhaps, something we should be promoting.
