‘Bankruptcy tourism’ under the EC regulation on insolvency proceedings: A view from England and Wales
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article provides an account of the emergent phenomenon of ‘bankruptcy tourism’—forum shopping by debtors for favourable personal insolvency law—within the EU and with particular reference to England and Wales. After outlining the structural features of the European legal framework that make forum shopping for personal insolvency law possible, including the EC Regulation on Insolvency Proceedings and explaining why England and Wales in particular has proved to be an attractive ‘tourist’ destination, the article charts how the official receivers and the courts in England and Wales have sought to manage the influx of foreign bankruptcies in terms of legal principle and process drawing on two reported cases, Eichler and Mitterfellner. It will be seen that the institutional response in England and Wales has been twofold. First, the ‘problem’ of forum shopping debtors has been framed as a problem of policing the line between genuine and fictional relocations. Secondly, there are signs that the procedural onus on debtors to evidence their claim to English jurisdiction before a bankruptcy order is made has been increased, a move that can be interpreted as a form of institutional resistance designed to raise the barrier to entry. Having sought to illuminate the problems, costs and inconvenience associated with forum shopping from a practitioner standpoint, we explore the ‘good’ versus ‘bad’ forum shopping question and consider the scope for reform of the EC Regulation. Adopting a creditor perspective, we conclude provisionally that the Regulation could usefully be reformed to limit the scope for insolvent debtors to switch their COMI in anticipation of filing for bankruptcy. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".