► In This Issue:

• A Note from your Co-chairs
• Filing in Your “Home” Country Doesn’t Mean You Will Get Instant Recognition in
  Canada: The Wolfridge Lodge Ltd. Saga
• Nortel: The Courts’ Creative Cross-Border Solution
• The View from Up North: The Collapse of Commodity Prices and the Impact on
  the Western Canadian Economy

A Note from your Co-chairs

Gilberto Deon Corrêa Souto, Correa, Cesa, Lummertz & Amaral Advogados Porto Alegre, Brazil

Christopher Mirick Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP New York

Greetings! Welcome to the October newsletter for the International Committee. We trust you will find it informative and useful.

As described below, we have partnered with the Secured Credit Committee for a presentation at the Winter Leadership Conference. Please consider attending the WLC. Not only is our panel certain to be entertaining, but the WLC provides a great opportunity to network and socialize with your colleagues throughout the industry.

If you are interested in being involved in the International Committee, please reach out to any member of the committee leadership team (which you can find listed on the ABI’s website). The newsletter provides a great opportunity to get your name and ideas out to a broad audience, and we are always looking for contributors. As always, volunteers (and ideas!) are welcome as we work on developing programs and activities that are interesting to our members.

Committee Survey
The committee leadership team is conducting a survey of committee members that will help the leadership team deliver the programs and services of most interest and benefit to committee members. You should have already received notice of the survey and an invitation to respond to it. If you already have, the leadership team thanks you. If you have not already done so, please take a few minutes to click on the link and complete the survey. The survey will remain open until October 23, 2015. Your participation is greatly appreciated.

Once the survey is closed, we will tabulate the results and we will report back to you on it in the next newsletter.

2015 WLC Joint Panel
This year’s Winter Leadership Conference will be held at the Arizona Biltmore, the “Jewel of the Desert,” in Phoenix Dec. 3-5, 2015. The Conference agenda is an interesting mix of educational programs and networking opportunities and social events, including tennis, golf and horseback riding. The International Committee, as part of its continuing commitment to its members to provide interesting and useful educational programs for its members, has paired up with the Secured Credit Committee for an educational session entitled, “Collateral Protection and Competing Priorities: Secured Credit in the International Arena.” Please come and join panelists Rebecca A. Roof, E. Patrick Shea, Frederic Sosnick and Prof. Jay L. Westbrook as they take us through the world of secured credit and how to protect it across national lines. ABI has provided committee members with an extended opportunity to receive the early bird rate - use EARLYBIRD4U at checkout.

Hope to see you in Arizona at the WLC!

Filing in Your “Home” Country Doesn’t Mean You Will Get Instant Recognition in Canada: The Wolfridge Lodge Ltd. Saga

Frank Spizzirri Baker & McKenzie LLP Toronto

A recent foreign recognition of a bankruptcy proceeding case out of Nova Scotia, Canada, has brought to light the situation where a Canadian company moves to the U.S., seeks protection under chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, and then seeks to impose that stay on creditors from its former home. Not surprisingly, it didn’t get very far with the Canadian court. And despite the rather unique facts and allegations of misconduct, the case sends the message that Canadian courts may not recognize foreign main proceedings simply because a plenary proceeding has been commenced in a foreign court and the technical requirements for recognition in Canada may have been met.
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Nortel: The Courts’ Creative Cross-Border Solution

Kenneth David Kraft Dentons Canada LLP Toronto

John Salmas Dentons Canada LLP Toronto

"The Court is convinced that where, as here, operating entities in an integrated, multi-national enterprise developed assets in common, there is nothing in the law or facts giving any of those entities certain and calculable claims to the proceeds from the liquidation of those assets in an enterprise-wide insolvency, adopting a pro rata allocation approach, which recognizes inter-company and settlement related claims and cash in hand, yields the most acceptable result.” [Judge Gross, In Re Nortel Networks, p. 64]  

"This is an unprecedented case involving insolvencies of many corporations and bankrupt estates in different jurisdictions. The intangible assets that were sold, being by far the largest type of asset sold, were not separately located in any one jurisdiction or owned separately in different jurisdictions…. Nortel was organized along global product lines … pursuant to a horizontally organized matrix structure and no one entity or region was able to provide the full line of Nortel products and services." [Justice Newbould, Nortel, par. 202.]
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The View from Up North: The Collapse of Commodity Prices and the Impact on the Western Canadian Economy

Frank Spizzirri Baker & McKenzie LLP Toronto

The oil boom is over. This is not an earth-shattering statement, given that we are now nearly a year into the precipitous price collapse of oil, which began in November 2014, with the price for a barrel of WTI crude oil falling from the $100 region to the $40-$50 range recently. With lots of supply, sketchy demand, and only small and slow cut backs in production, it is unclear (read: unlikely) whether oil prices will rise any time soon. While low oil prices are good for the consumer in terms of lower gas prices and cheaper transportation costs for goods purchased, for regions where oil and gas are the mainstays of the local economy, persistently low prices are not good news.
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