By Jonathan Lipson (Temple University Beasley School of Law)
Jonathan Lipson
[Editor’s Note: The author represented, on a pro bono basis, an individual claimant in the bankruptcy of Purdue Pharma.]
In late 2022, counsel for opioid-maker Purdue Pharma posted an essay on the Harvard Bankruptcy Roundtable (HBRT), “Please Don’t Forget the Victims: Mass Torts, Third Party Releases and the U.S. Bankruptcy Code” (“Forget”).Forget largely restated arguments they made to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in their bid to reinstate controversial nonconsensual nondebtor “releases” (NDRs) of collateral civil liability arising from the OxyContin-maker’s confessed drug-marketing crimes. HBRT asked me to respond to Forget because I was pro bono counsel to one of those they would have us remember: Peter Jackson, whose daughter Emily died after taking a single OxyContin in 2006.
While the sentiment to “remember the victims” is laudable, the substance of Forget renders its title a cruel irony. Forget says almost nothing about the victims of a public health crisis that has taken over half a million lives and in which Purdue Pharma, and its wealthy and secretive owners, the Sacklers, apparently played a singular role. Instead, Forget would honor survivors of this crisis through the use of legally dubious NDRs.
Forget conspicuously omits or distorts problems in the Purdue Pharma case and precedent on which its NDRs would rest. It ignores the fact that nondebtor “releases” and “settlements” are contractual in nature, and cannot be forced onto the unwilling; that over 80% of creditors cast no vote on Purdue Pharma’s plan, so there was hardly “overwhelming” support for it; and that the precedent on which they rely—historic mass tort and Supreme Court cases—are readily distinguishable from Purdue Pharma.
Forget would have us forget just how problematic Purdue Pharma—and its quest to insulate the Sackler family—has been, thereby seeking to induce a kind of “bankruptcy amnesia.”
By Marshall S. Huebner and Marc J. Tobak (Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP)
Marshall S. HuebnerMarc J. Tobak
[Editor’s Note: The authors, along with other attorneys at Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP, represent Purdue Pharma L.P. and various affiliated debtors in connection with their ongoing bankruptcy proceedings.]
For decades, third party releases have been the cornerstone of mass tort bankruptcies that have resolved previously intractable litigation and provided meaningful compensation to victims who might well have otherwise recovered nothing. In cases such as Johns-Manville (asbestos), A.H. Robins (Dalkon Shield), Dow Corning (silicone breast implants), Mallinckrodt (opioids), and Boy Scouts of America, courts concluded, on a developed factual record informed by pre-bankruptcy litigation history, that value-maximizing settlements and plans of reorganization were viable only by providing settling parties paying into the estate third party releases of appropriate scope. The alternative to these broadly and deeply supported settlements, many in the billions of dollars, was years of costly and uncoordinated litigation in scores of fora and resulting in greatly diminished victim recoveries.
Critiques of third party releases often argue that these releases are in some way unfair to the parties subject to the release, or that third party release cases privilege monetary recoveries over nonmonetary goals. This article aims to address these issues and refocus the debate on the importance of third party releases in achieving and maximizing monetary and nonmonetary goals of victims in mass tort bankruptcies.
First, we canvass the overwhelming judicial consensus that the Bankruptcy Code (including sections 105 and 1123) authorizes third-party releases and channeling injunctions where important or essential to a value-maximizing reorganization, meet additional limiting tests, and are within the court’s jurisdiction. We highlight that a thorough examination of United States v. Energy Resources Co., 495 U.S. 545 (1990), demonstrates that the Supreme Court specifically affirmed the power of bankruptcy courts to confirm plans of reorganization that nonconsensually adjust rights and liabilities among third parties when such adjustments enable a successful reorganization.
Second, we examine how existing law—properly applied—appropriately limits third party releases to circumstances in which they maximize value for, and are broadly supported by, victims and other creditors. Proponents of a third party release plan must not only convince the court that it is objectively superior to the alternatives; in addition, the parties directly affected by the release must vote in favor of the plan by an “overwhelming” margin. Unsurprisingly, such plans are often crafted by creditors and debtors together, ensuring that they reflect victims’ monetary and nonmonetary goals.
Finally, we consider how mass tort resolutions would necessarily change if third party releases were to become unavailable. We note that recent legislative initiatives to categorically ban third party releases outside the asbestos context would make mass tort victims far worse off without achieving countervailing benefits. We recommend that legislative efforts directed at third party releases instead subject them to uniform procedures and standards. Such legislation would address valid critiques of overused third party releases while ensuring that they remain available, under uniform standards, in cases in which they are indispensable.
Note: This is the Harvard Law School Bankruptcy Roundtable’s last scheduled post for the fall of 2022. The BRT intends to resume posting around mid-January, 2023. The BRT wishes all its readers an enjoyable holiday season!
Note: This is the eighth in a series of posts on the Texas Two-Step, the bankruptcy of LTL Management, and the future of mass tort bankruptcies. Styled as a coda of sorts, this double-post includes a new view on section 548 by Judge Judith Fitzgerald (ret.) and Adam Levitin, and some commentary on the other posts in the series by John Pottow.
Check the HLS Bankruptcy Roundtable periodically for additional contributing posts by academics and others from institutions across the country.
Earlier posts in this series can be found here (by Jin Lee and Amelia Ricketts), here (by Jonathan C. Lipson), here (by Jared A. Ellias), here (by Anthony Casey and Joshua Macey), here (by David Skeel), here (by Ralph Brubaker), and here (by Mark Roe and William Organek).
***
Post One: The Texas Two-Step: A Different Look at Bankruptcy Code Section 548
By Hon. Judith K. Fitzgerald (ret.) (Professor in the Practice of Law, University of Pittsburgh School of Law; Shareholder, Tucker Arensberg, P.C.) and Adam J. Levitin (Anne Fleming Research Professor & Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center; Principal, Gordian Crypto Advisors LLC)[^]
Hon. Judith K. Fitzgerald (ret.)Adam J. Levitin
Is the divisive merger in a Texas Two-Step bankruptcy a fraudulent transfer? To date, much of the analysis has focused on the question of the “transfer” of assets. From this perspective, the application of fraudulent transfer law is an uncomfortable fit. In a divisive merger, OldCo disposes of assets and liabilities by assigning the valuable assets to GoodCo and dumping the disfavored liabilities on BadCo. Yet the Texas divisive merger statute provides that “all rights, title and interest” in property are allocated in a divisive merger without “any transfer or assignment having occurred.”[1] If state law deems the divisive merger not to constitute any form of transfer, how can a fraudulent transfer have occurred?
As Roe and Organek rightly contend, the Supremacy Clause mandates use of the Bankruptcy Code (“Code”) definition of “transfer” to the exclusion of contrary state law. Likewise, the Uniform Fraudulent Transfer Act has its own definition of transfer and indicates that the definitions are “[a]s used in this [Act],” such that even under state law the divisive merger statute’s definition of transfer would not control in a fraudulent transfer, voidable transactions, or § 544(b) action.
The key problem with viewing a divisive merger through the “transfer” lens is that Code § 548 requires the transfer to be one made by the debtor—BadCo—of its property or an interest it held in property. BadCo, however, did not exist at the time of the transfer and had no property at all. The transfer of the assets to GoodCo was not from BadCo, but from OldCo, which no longer exists. These seem to create impediments to attacking a divisive merger as a fraudulent transfer.
In order to bring the divisive merger within the ambit of § 548, a complainant might have to take an additional step, such as establishing that BadCo was the alter ego of the entity that transferred the property (as Roe and Organek note), or substantively consolidating BadCo and GoodCo. Without consolidation of BadCo and GoodCo, or an unwinding of the divisive merger altogether, a court could conclude that BadCo did not transfer property or an interest in property.
There is another part of § 548, however, that is a better fit for attacking a divisive merger.[2] Section 548 also permits the avoidance of an obligation incurred by the debtor, for which the debtor received less than reasonably equivalent value and/or was insolvent at the time or was made insolvent as the result of the obligation.
The Texas divisive merger statute presents no obstacle for this theory. That statute deals with allocation of assets and liabilities under separate provisions. The asset provision deems the allocation of assets not to be a transfer,[3] but there is no equivalent language in the liabilities provision.[4] That is, nothing in the Texas statute states that the allocation of liabilities is not the incurrence of an obligation.
Similarly, § 548 refers to incurrence of an obligation by the debtor, a concept that works much better than a focus on transferring property of the debtor. Whereas the transfer provision implicitly requires the debtor to have had property to transfer in the first instance, the incurrence provision has no similar implication. All that is required is that the debtor, BadCo, incur an obligation that left it insolvent or insufficiently capitalized, a description that fits the treatment of BadCo in a divisive merger to a tee.
For example, in the divisive merger that preceded the LTL Management LLC bankruptcy filing, the BadCo, LTL, was saddled with all of the talc liabilities of OldCo (Old JJCI), an unliquidated liability in the billions of dollars. As part of the same transaction, it was given royalty-producing assets worth enough to cover the anticipated professionals’ fees in the bankruptcy, and certain insurance policies. LTL was also allocated a funding agreement by which both GoodCo (New JJCI) and OldCo’s parent (J&J) were to cover talc liabilities inside or outside bankruptcy, up to the value of OldCo on the date of the divisive merger, provided that certain conditions to use are satisfied. All of OldCo’s other assets (valuable brands and the JJCI name) and other liabilities were allocated to New JJCI. If the talc claims against LTL exceed the value of OldCo, then LTL would be insolvent, and the incurrence of the talc liabilities would be avoidable under § 548.
The distinction between transfers and obligations may support a fresh look at § 548, but raises the question of the remedy. The Code’s remedial provision, § 550, deals solely with recovery for the benefit of the bankruptcy estate of any avoided transfers of property; it is not geared toward the incurrence of obligations. But § 550 may not be necessary as a remedial provision regarding incurrence of obligations. Section 548’s language that “[t]he trustee may avoid…any obligation incurred … by the debtor” may itself be all that is necessary.
So what does this mean in practical terms? The avoiding of the incurrence of an obligation does not mean that the obligation disappears. Instead, its allocation follows normal state law successor liability principles. In the case of LTL, successor liability would likely put the talc liability squarely back on GoodCo through its continuation of OldCo’s business.
Focusing on obligations does not itself answer the valuation question about BadCo’s solvency, but it is a far better fit with fraudulent transfer law than trying to shoe-horn a divisive merger transaction into the definition of a “transfer” by a company that did not exist at the time property was transferred.
[^] Professors Fitzgerald and Levitin are both retained as consultants by certain talc claimants in the LTL bankruptcy; their opinions are their own.
A series of excellent posts have probed the recent developments of the infamous Texas Two-Step, and so I have only three additional comments.
First, a threshold issue that hungers for resolution is the idiosyncrasy of Texas law. As Jonathan Lipson points out, vertical forum shopping has suitors flocking to the bankruptcy court system, but what they specifically want is application of Texas corporate law. Specifically, mass tort defendants must avail themselves of its Doublespeak divisional merger statute and its “non-transfer transfers.” The issue is whether a transfer ordinarily susceptible to fraudulent conveyance scrutiny can be statutorily immunized by legislative pronouncement that it is an “un-transfer.” While this might invite the sort of textualism disquisition that would enthrall some (can the legislature define the black, frequently granulated table spice as “salt” without offending well-socialized legal sensibilities?), I am thematically drawn to Mark Roe and William Organek’s supremacy argument mooting it all out: that the Bankruptcy Code’s definition of “transfer” may supersede Texas’s. But I don’t think they get all the way there. My hopefully congenial amendment to their position is that additional work must be done to get the ball over the finish line by making out a Butner argument—which ought not be heavy-lifting—that federal bankruptcy purposes (e.g., preserving all assets for collective creditor treatment) warrant overriding the presumptive deference to state law definitions of property entitlements.
Second, all substantive concern, e.g., expressed as upsetting bankruptcy’s “traditional bargain” in Jared Ellias’ words (and especially so if they are solvent, as Ralph Brubaker reminds), really boils down to this: Are they cheating? And as Anthony Casey and Joshua Macey have noted, what that really means is: Are there enough assets left for the claimants? And that, as the road-terminus Rome of so many bankruptcy matters, is ultimately a valuation question—of claims, assets, going-concern surplus…the whole nine yards. Forests of trees have died in service of bankruptcy scholarship on valuation, and, just to make you, Dear Likely Reader, feel old, recall that North LaSalle well-preceded the birth of most current law students. My two cents in these hyper-inflationary times is that whenever I distrust valuation, and Ken Ayotte notes elsewhere that we should be extra-distrustful with synthetic analogues to real assets, I revert to my instincts that it’s hard to beat having skin in the game. Indeed, the elegance of the Code’s section 524(g) is in requiring the backstopping by half the equity of the company. So a “funding agreement” is fine and dandy, as is an “extraordinarily large” contribution of capital, but it’s no pledging of cold, hard assets. Third-party releases on demand? Not so fast! If debtors want to reap the bankruptcy system efficiencies of speedy aggregate litigation, they should have to backstop that benefit with the internalized risk of real, teethy underwriting.
Finally, and this point segues from the prior observation, the role of the discretion accorded bankruptcy judges stands front and center with the Two-Step. As the presumable watchdogs of over-reaching-cum-under-endowing BadCo, the bankruptcy judges wield their power to dispatch for lack of good faith or for receiving lack of reasonably equivalent value. (For the efficacy of bankruptcy judges in valuation matters, see Forests, supra.) To feel comfortable with them, then, one requires a sense of attunement to the risks and issues at stake. Yet as David Skeel reminded us, the gushing endorsement of the bankruptcy system dripping in the LTL opinion (or, perhaps by corollary, angst about the state tort system) may augur poorly for a critical eye being cast on these un-mergers. Unless we see some pushback and demonstrated non-naivete, legislative intervention seems overdetermined, as Jin Lee and Amelia Ricketts have already flagged.
I am broadly sympathetic to modular usages of the bankruptcy system, but I have also been around enough blocks to know that one person’s more efficient resolution is another’s value-extracting cudgel. To cheerily assume the riskless benefit (low risk, high returns!) of this latest bankruptcy innovation is not just blinkered but is a Siren call for legislative intervention.
By Jin Lee and Amelia Ricketts (Harvard Law School)
Note: This is the first in a series of posts on the Texas Two Step, the bankruptcy of LTL Management, and the future of mass tort bankruptcies. Check the HLS Bankruptcy Roundtable throughout the summer for additional contributing posts by academics from institutions across the country.
Jin LeeAmelia Ricketts
Judge Kaplan’s recent decision not to dismiss the LTL Management (LTL)/Johnson & Johnson (J&J) bankruptcy has further stirred controversy about the hotly debated Texas Two-Step Maneuver, and put an end to speculation on how the bankruptcy court would rule on J&J’s Texas Two-Step bankruptcy filing. (The decision has been appealed directly to the Third Circuit).
The court rejected tort claimants’ arguments that LTL’s filing violated the good faith requirement for Chapter 11 filings or warranted “for cause” dismissal under Section 1112. Judge Kaplan held that the filing was an appropriate use of the Bankruptcy Code to maximize value available to creditors, commenting that the bankruptcy court would be the “optimal” venue to resolve tort claimants’ treatment. The judge emphasized compliance with the terms of the Texas divisional merger statute as evidence of J&J’s good faith. He also viewed the funding agreement among LTL, J&J, and J&J’s consumer division subsidiary as providing LTL with appropriate capitalization to meet the talc claimants’ needs. As a result, Judge Kaplan concluded that the talc claimants’ interests would be best served by the bankruptcy process and denied their motion to dismiss.
Johnson & Johnson’s use of the Texas Two-Step to manage its talc liabilities has put the company, and the Two-Step, front and center in the roiling debates over aggressive uses of the bankruptcy system. Those debates have led to scholarly criticism, congressional hearings, and proposed legislation that would curtail debtors’ ability to so use the bankruptcy courts.
My Essay details the mechanics of the Two-Step. Beginning with the Texas divisive merger, the funding agreement, and forum shopping for the Fourth Circuit, the Essay fleshes out precisely how the Two-Step boxes in tort claimants. Like other scholarship, this Essay identifies the risk that such maneuvering effects a fraudulent transfer. It also goes a step further, arguing that the point of the Two-Step is not to succeed, but to delay. Fraudulent-transfer litigation in a bankruptcy consumes time because it requires an adversary proceeding, and that delay pressures tort claimants to settle. So the Two-Step can succeed as long as claimants cannot wait out the course of the bankruptcy, even if a court never declares the particular Two-Step to be a proper use of divisive merger law rather than an improper fraudulent transfer.
Instead of playing into this delay game, this Essay argues, courts should evaluate the Texas Two-Step for good faith. Tort claimants can raise such challenges as a motion to dismiss (as some have) and thus avoid the need for a fraudulent-transfer adversary proceeding. And under current doctrine, the Two-Step likely qualifies as a bad-faith filing: In most cases, the Two-Step is a litigation tactic. And the Two-Step, invariably, is filed by an entity created solely to file for bankruptcy. Both of those are doctrinal hallmarks of bad-faith bankruptcies.
More broadly, the Essay explains, the Two-Step and good-faith challenges to it underscore the continuing role of common law in bankruptcy. The Code does not define good-faith filing, so courts have developed the doctrine case by case. They may yet find an acceptable form of Two-Step, one which yields tort claimants the rights they would receive in, say, a Johnson & Johnson bankruptcy, without hurting Johnson & Johnson’s ability to do business by forcing the whole company into bankruptcy. Along the way, though, a vigilant common-law gatekeeping is warranted, and judges should not hesitate to dismiss Two-Steps thinking that a later ruling on a fraudulent-transfer adversary proceeding can adequately safeguard tort claimants from an improper use of the bankruptcy system.
The full essay will be available at 121 Mich. L. Rev. Online __ (forthcoming 2022) and can be accessed here.
By Niklas Hüther (Indiana University) and Kristoph Kleiner (Indiana University)
Niklas HütherKristoph Kleiner
”The bankruptcy system is supposed to work for everyone, but in many cases it works only for the powerful.” – House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, July 28th, 2021
Researchers have long recognized that judicial outcomes are subject to the biases of the ruling judge. To alleviate concerns of fairness, courts in both the U.S. and abroad claim to assign judges to individual court cases randomly. From a policy perspective, randomization promotes public confidence in the judicial process by limiting forum shopping and the individual influence of any individual judge. From an academic perspective, recent empirical research in economics and finance exploits the random assignment of judges to causally identify of a wide range of legal outcomes.
This paper revisits the claim of randomized judicial assignment in the context of U.S. Bankruptcy Court. Our research is motivated by legal scholarship arguing that debtors in recent cases are influencing judicial assignments (Levitin, 2021), as well as renewed interest in these issues from policy makers and the public (Merle and Bernstein, 2019; Randles 2020). Despite these arguments, there are reasons to believe assignment is random. For instance, after contacting all U.S. Bankruptcy Courts, Iverson et al. (2017) found that only one court (the Eastern District of Wisconsin) reports assigning cases to judges non-randomly. In addition, a range of research including Bernstein et al. (2019)provides convincing evidence that debtor characteristics fail to predict judicial assignments. Missing from this literature is any large-scale empirical evidence of non-random assignment.
Analyzing U.S. corporate bankruptcy filings between 2010 and 2020, we provide new evidence that assignment is not random, but predicted by the lending decisions of hedge funds. By focusing on investments made before the assignment of a bankruptcy judge, our technique is not suspect to standard critiques that predictability is merely an outcome of ex-post data mining; instead, in order for investors to systemically invest in firms that are later assigned a preferred judge, it must be possible to infer future judicial assignments. In addition, we focus on hedge funds, as they routinely influence a wide range of bankruptcy outcomes including emergence and debt restructurings. The prevalence of these investors allows us to explore a new channel of activism in the distress debt market: activist influence in judicial assignment process prior to filing.
In our setting, judges can decide whether to convert a Chapter 11 bankruptcy to a Chapter 7 liquidation; while secured creditors may have a preference for liquidation, unsecured creditors recover more under reorganization. Exploiting this distinction, we confirm unsecured hedge fund creditors (relative to secured hedge funds) are significantly less likely to be assigned a judge with a tendency to convert Chapter 11 cases. We also extend our analysis to an alternate bankruptcy outcome measure: the unsecured creditor recovery rate according to the confirmed plan. We find unsecured hedge funds are far more likely to be assigned a judge with a high past unsecured recovery rate.
We next test whether these estimates differ across the filings in our sample. First, we find that unsecured hedge fund claimants are assigned a preferable judge more commonly when the hedge fund invested shortly before the bankruptcy filing, suggesting hedge funds choose to invest explicitly to influence the filing. Second, we show the effects are greatest when the hedge fund is on the board of directors of the debtor at the time of filing, providing further support for the role of communication between debtor and creditor.
Finally, we conduct three robustness tests. First, we find no evidence that a judge’s future conversion rate (after controlling for the past conversion rate) is predicted by hedge fund investment, suggesting hedge funds are explicitly influencing judicial assignment based on information regarding past information. Second, focusing on the subset of districts that explicitly state random assignment within their district, we continue to find hedge fund investments predict assignment. Third, we include district-office-year fixed effects in our analysis and continue to find a relationship between hedge fund investments and assignment.
Moving forward, we believe there are two potential policies that can alleviate these issues. The first, and simplest, is for policy makers to develop a truly randomized process. Alternatively, policy makers can instead increase the number of bankruptcy judges, leading to lower predictability even if assignment is not fully randomized. Policy makers intent on a fairer judicial system should consider both proposals.
By Amelia S. Ricketts (Harvard Law School) and Jin Lee (Harvard Law School)
Amelia RickettsJin Lee
On February 8, 2022, the Senate Subcommittee on Federal Courts, Oversight, Agency Action, and Federal Rights held a hearing on the process through which corporations allegedly side-step accountability through divisive mergers undertaken immediately prior to bankruptcy, commonly known as the “Texas Two-Step.”
Companies have used the Two-Step when they have incurred significant liabilities in mass tort cases. The company first changes its state of incorporation to Texas or Delaware. It then carries out a divisive merger, splitting into GoodCo and BadCo. GoodCo retains all of the company assets and the non-tort liabilities, while BadCo retains the mass tort liabilities. BadCo then files for bankruptcy, while GoodCo continues business in the ordinary course. BadCo requests that the automatic stay be extended to GoodCo, preventing tort victims from seeking relief from GoodCo.
Typically, as part of the divisive merger, GoodCo and BadCo execute a funding agreement whereby GoodCo agrees to fund any victims’ trust established in bankruptcy, but usually specifying an amount far below the potential liability. One witness argued that these agreements should assuage concerns about divisive merger bankruptcies, while others argued that they did not offer tort victims real recourse.
Certain witnesses objected to using the Texas Two-Step to obtain the benefits of bankruptcy without the burdens and urged legislative reform to prevent divisive merger bankruptcies. Others argued that the current bankruptcy protections, such as bad faith dismissal and fraudulent transfer law, were sufficient to guard against abuse. However, courts are generally reluctant to dismiss a case for bad faith. Moreover, fraudulent transfer law’s usefulness is also uncertain, because the Texas state law treats the divisive merger transaction as though no transfer has occurred. The witnesses also discussed Johnson & Johnson’s use of the Two-Step as an example and test case for existing protections against abuse.
By Michael J. Cohen, Michael A. Rosenthal & Matthew J. Williams (Gibson Dunn)
The recent decision in In re Purdue Pharma did not uphold the third-party releases in the bankruptcy court’s approved plan. This post discuss the third-party releases issue.
— Harvard Law School Bankruptcy Roundtable Editors
Michael J. CohenMichael A. RosenthalMatthew J. Williams
On July 28, 2021, certain Democratic members of Congress, primarily in response to the $4.325 billion contribution made by the Sackler family to fund the settlement underpinning Purdue Pharma’s chapter 11 plan, introduced the Nondebtor Release Prohibition Act of 2021 (the “NRPA”), which proposes to amend the Bankruptcy Code to (i) prohibit the use of non-consensual third party releases in chapter 11 plans, (ii) limit so-called “Section 105” injunctions to stay lawsuits against third parties to a period no greater than 90 days after the commencement of a bankruptcy case, and (iii) provide a ground for dismissing a bankruptcy case commenced by a debtor that was formed within 10 years prior to such case via a divisional merger that separated material assets from liabilities.
When viewed against the backdrop of current complex chapter 11 practice, the NRPA is a flawed remedy for issues for which alternative means of redress already exist. First, the proposed elimination of the important bankruptcy tools of non-consensual third party releases and Section 105 injunctions – each of which is extraordinary in nature and only permitted in the rarest of circumstances – is a blunt force measure that threatens to vitiate the longstanding bankruptcy policy of favoring settlements over interminable value-destructive litigation. Second, the loss of these tools may cause inequitable disruption in currently pending cases and stymie the implementation of critical creditor-supported strategies to resolve the most difficult cases going forward. Moreover, a per se prohibition against non-debtor releases would contravene core bankruptcy principles by elevating the interests of a minority of creditors who would otherwise be bound to the terms of a chapter 11 plan containing such a release that is supported by the requisite majorities required under the Bankruptcy Code. Third, while the disincentive against divisional mergers would affect a far more limited set of cases, it appears that the harm raised by some divisional mergers that are followed by bankruptcy may be adequately addressed through clarifying the applicability of fraudulent transfer law to challenge these transactions.
On November 3, 2021, the House Judiciary Committee sent the NRPA to the House floor for further consideration; the Senate Judiciary Committee has yet to act on the bill. For more detail on the NRPA and our analysis of the bill, please find the full article here.
The COVID pandemic put unprecedented pressure on all economies around the world. Many predicted that this economic dislocation would lead to an unprecedented number of corporate bankruptcies. This did not happen. The American government and other governments responded with extraordinary measures. While these measures allowed companies to ride out the worst of the pandemic, they did have consequences. Many large companies were left with unprecedentedly large amounts of debt on their balance sheets.
Perhaps a robust economy will allow companies to grow their way out from under their debt burden. But perhaps not. To prepare for the possible future increase in large companies filing for bankruptcy, Congress should act now to build up a bankruptcy infrastructure sufficient to handle an influx in cases. Specifically, Congress should require that every circuit create a “business bankruptcy panel” designed to administer the Chapter 11 filing of large companies. As is well-known, three bankruptcy districts currently serve as dominant venues for large cases – the District of Delaware, the Southern District of New York and the Southern District of Texas. It is by no means clear that these three courts could handle a significant increase in caseloads. Creating expertise across the country would help prepare the system for any future rise in cases. A secondary benefit of this reform is that it may also ameliorate some of the concerns that have been raised over the years by the dominance of a small number of venues for large corporate cases.
By Sheila C. Neder Cerezetti (Professor of Law, University of São Paulo Law School)
Sheila C. Neder Cerezetti
As argued by prominent Brazilian scholars, some of the most relevant attributes of the corporate form – limited liability and asset partitioning – might be considered just a tale in Brazil, as they have been consistently and subsequently weakened by a variety of reasons.
In light of this and of the large number of corporate reorganization cases involving groups of companies, which gave way to a series of unsubstantiated applications of substantive consolidation, the article raises the debate on the correct use of the mechanism in the country.
I question whether the lenient approach to substantive consolidation by Brazilian courts (i) is a natural consequence of the weakening of limited liability and asset partitioning, and (ii) represents a better way to recognize the Brazilian corporate reality, bringing more truth to reorganizations.
In the attempt to answer these questions, the article introduces the basic aspects of corporate reorganization in Brazil, offering a comprehensive overview of the Brazilian Bankruptcy Act (Law No. 11,101/2005). The description addresses the broad use of procedural and substantive consolidation even if, at the time, the Brazilian Bankruptcy Act lacked provisions for proceedings with multiple debtors. It shows that the permissive approach first directed to procedural consolidation slowly unraveled into a silent acceptance of substantive consolidation.
Next, the article explores some of the uses of substantive consolidation in the USA (where the mechanism started and gained traction) and in the UNCITRAL Legislative Guide on Insolvency Law (an important indicator of what might be adopted in other jurisdiction in the future), with a brief reference to the status of the matter in the European Union. In these cases, a set of prerequisites have been established to determine when the exceptional measure of the mechanism is appropriate.
In contrast, I call a misuse the often-unsubstantiated acceptance of substantive consolidation in Brazil, that fails to note its exceptionally. In the vast majority of cases, substantive consolidation actually happened in proceedings where none of the parties and not even the court expressly addressed the issue and implicitly just treated a single plan as something normal, although it mixed assets and liabilities of different debtors. And in those cases where the matter has been expressly addressed, the criteria for ordering the consolidation (i) varied greatly, to the point that it could not be rationalized in the form of a test, and (ii) failed to treat the remedy as an exceptional tool.
In light of the mentioned “tale of limited liability in Brazil”, one could wonder if such a misuse of substantive consolidation is in fact inappropriate. However, I argue that this tale is not so severe as to justify the lenient approach described, in view of the rules on corporate groups as well as of the fact that strictly commercial and civil relationships are, for the most part, protected from the exceptions to limited liability.
The article contends that there still is a compelling case for a stricter use of substantive consolidation, considering, among other reasons, that accepting the lenient criteria for ordering substantive consolidation would mean further weakening the attributes of the corporate form. It concludes by pointing to other tools in bankruptcy law that can better deal with the exceptions to the limitation of liability, and argues that substantive consolidation should remain a remedy for abuses of the corporate form that turn it dysfunctional.
Finally, it should be noted that a recently approved bill included provisions on procedural and substantive consolidation in the Brazilian Bankruptcy Law, ratifying the lenient approach described in the article. The article also serves as an explanatory description of the pathways that led the Brazilian legal system to such a discipline and as a warning about the perils of following this route.
