Vol 13 (2016) - Issue 6

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A Fork in the Road: The Privy Council’s Decision in Singularis

Introduction
Judicial cooperation at common law has been commonplace in cross-border insolvency cases ever since the English court held in Solomons v Ross that English movables vested automatically in Dutch assignees appointed in a Dutch bankruptcy. Since then, the available assistance at common law has developed slowly and incrementally and several forms of available assistance have been established. Nowadays, in most jurisdictions legislation has been enacted for dealing with cross-border assistance. This has largely reduced the discussion on whether insolvency proceedings should be universal or territorial to a difference of perspective, as every jurisdiction has enacted something in between. This, together with the enactment of the UNCITRAL Model Law on Cross-Border Insolvency and the European Insolvency Regulation, has, in this area, decreased the role of the common law and has further decelerated its development. This is not, however, the case for a number of British Overseas Territories. They do not yet have similar sophisticated frameworks and still have to rely heavily on the common law. Consequently, the insolvency world was reminded of the potential of the common law in 2006, when the Privy Council took a revolutionary universalist approach in the now illustrious Cambridge Gas judgment. However, the string of cases that followed seemed to claw back much of that enthusiasm and in Singularis the final blow to the controversial propositions of Cambridge Gas has arguably been delivered. This article examines the seemingly contrasting cases of Cambridge Gas and Singularis, together with the development of the case law between the two decisions, discussing to what extent the views on judicial cooperation as represented by those cases are reconcilable.