You might also be interested in ...
Riding the new wave of insolvency: Podcast 5
Jennifer Ball, Partner, Litigation
Steve Parbury, PPB
Jennifer Ball
Hello, I'm Jennifer Ball, an insolvency partner at Clayton Utz. I'm here with Steve Parbury, a senior and founding partner of PPB. This is a surprise fifth podcast, designed to give delegates a postscript of the events of INSOL Shanghai, INSOL's international regional conference which ran from 14 to 16 September in Shanghai. Steve was a co-presenter of the breakout session, Risk Management and Restructuring Procedures. Steve, what would you say are the key takeouts of the presentation?
Steve Parbury
Yes Jenny, it was I think a really well-held conference. There was about 400 delegates and I think we had about 200 to our breakout sessions and there's a really keen interest in the topics that we were dealing with on risk issues in relation to restructuring. I was leading it from the point of view of looking at it as a director. We also had a situation where Ian Anderson from Citigroup was looking at it from the perspective of a banker and Jamie Sprayregen from Goldman Sachs Group was looking at it from the point of view of a debtor.
I think the big takeout from it was how our different jurisdictions had different risk issues and how the economic climate at present has changed some of the risk profiles. We not only went across the different perspectives of different stakeholders in a restructure, we also look at it from the point of view of the different risks in terms of jurisdictional or legal risks across those jurisdictions and I think they were the really good takeouts.
The other one was of course that those risk issues change dramatically as we're heading towards some form of a global downturn when asset values are dropping, so obviously it's much more riskier to be dealing with a restructuring, there are many more issues through the restructuring when asset values aren't holding up.
Jennifer Ball
The focus I guess Steve of INSOL Shanghai was to be firmly on the needs of practitioners of whom were attending from a wide range of backgrounds, countries and regulatory systems. The risk issues in the US still compare comparably to those in Australia.
Steve Parbury
Yes, we looked at the risk issues, mainly in the pre-appointment stage of the restructure. In Australia we've got our insolvent trading laws which basically present high risk for people dealing in this area because you might become personally liable for the debts that are incurred during that period of advice, especially if you're doomed to be a shadow director.
The issue we've got in the States of course, it's a much softer process, and they don't have that liability risk. In Europe it's probably midway, so it's quite interesting getting the different perspective across those different regions.
Jennifer Ball
It was certainly ironic that the credit crisis, which we had noted in our first podcast was presenting new challenges, ended up having a direct impact on the conference.
Steve Parbury
Quite interestingly, one of the issues in today's modern age is how technology transfers information very quickly so people were using their Blackberrys etc when Lehmans blew up. A lot of the delegates at that conference we interested in or involved in the demise of Lehmans so they were either dealing with it on their Blackberrys as it occurred or they were going back to the States to see that their jobs were still intact, so it directly impacted right across the board.
Jennifer Ball
And Steve I understand that some presenters only stepped in pretty much at the last minute to help out where others had to leave as a result of the Lehman Brothers matter.
Steve Parbury
Yeah, it was quite interesting really; we had I think two of our panel members, Ian Anderson from Citigroup filled in at the last moment, and Jamie Sprayregen filled in very much at the last moment as well, probably primarily as a result of crises that were happening in the US so, you know, we were fairly grateful to them to be able to make that time up at short notice.
Jennifer Ball
Thank you so much Steve for those insights. It certainly was for me a very useful conference to attend and was quite dynamic with changes occurring daily in the credit crisis.
