Antecedent Transactions: Onshore and Offshore Updates

On 21 January, Hong Kong Restructuring partner John Marsden was invited to deliver a seminar titled “Antecedent Transactions: Onshore and Offshore Updates” at the HKICPA’s office in Wanchai.  Around 120 HKICPA (Hong Kong Institute of Certified Public Accountants) members and leading insolvency practitioners attended the event. The seminar was chaired by a member of the HKICPA’s Restructuring and Insolvency Faculty Executive Committee. The other speaker was Shaun Folpp, a senior practitioner from Mourant, a leading offshore law firm.

John started by discussing the background to antecedent transactions and invited the audience to think about the policy rationale of avoidance regimes, and the remedies and defences available in statute and common law for such transactions. Then Shaun and John analysed the recent UK Privy Council decision in Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken AB (PUBL) (SEB) v Conway and Shakespeare (as Joint Official Liquidators of Weavering Macro Fixed Income Fund Limited), which held that redemption payments made shortly before the collapse of Weavering Macro Fixed Income Fund constituted preferences over the Fund's other creditors. The panel went on to discuss the law of the Cayman Islands comparing it with the Hong Kong regime relating to the avoidance of transactions in insolvency proceedings.