Security Interests: Airline Insolvency Conflicts Between Commerce and State

Event venue: 
Online
Event date: 
Wednesday, August 26, 2020 -
18:00 to 19:00
 
 
Presentation: Cape Town Convention: commercial certainty or state sensitivities?

Dr Anton Didenko, UNSW Law, CLMR

In almost 80 countries, including Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, China, Spain, Ireland, and the USA, domestic laws on taking security over aircraft and parts of aircraft are superseded by an international treaty regime established by the Cape Town Convention (CTC) and its Aircraft Protocol. This means that the provisions of the CTC will determine priorities among secured parties and the effects of insolvency of the debtor, as well as the types of remedies available to creditors. On the one hand, the relevant provisions are mainly driven by the desire to promote legal certainty and predictability of secured transactions. On the other hand, different sensitivities (such as state sovereignty and public interests or the need to balance the interests of multiple stakeholders, including the debtor and third parties) have limited the reach of its provisions. This session introduces the key features of the CTC and explain the forces that shaped the treaty and its protocols in their current form.

Commentary

Associate Professor David Brown, Adelaide Law School

Associate Professor Brown will discuss the insolvency provisions of the CTC Aircraft Protocol, the Australian experience in the Virgin Australia voluntary administration, and more broadly some considerations for airline insolvency globally, including the impact of COVID-19.

Chair

Associate Professor Rob Nicholls, UNSW Business School, CLMR

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Bios

Dr Didenko is a Research Fellow in the Centre for Law, Markets and Regulation within the Faculty of Law at the University of New South Wales (UNSW Sydney), where he focuses on the area of banking and finance law. He is a qualified lawyer in Russia (with a law degree from the Russian Foreign Trade Academy) and holds Magister Juris and Doctor of Philosophy degrees from the University of Oxford. Anton specialises in the area of secured transactions law, focusing on the CTC, and is the General Editor of the Cape Town Convention Journal. His forthcoming monograph ‘Documentary History of the Cape Town Convention: The Key Challenges’ (2021, Hart Publishing) is the first comprehensive research of the history of the CTC and its protocols.

Mr Brown is an Associate Professor at Adelaide Law School, Co-Director of ROCIT (Research Unit on Corporations Insolvency and Taxation) and a qualified (non-practising) lawyer in New Zealand, and England and Wales. He teaches and researches in the areas of Insolvency, Property and Secured Transactions and has written or co-authored a number of books in these areas in England, New Zealand and Australia, including A Duggan and D Brown, Australian Personal Property Securities Law (LexisNexis 2016, 2nd ed.).

Dr Nicholls is an Associate Professor in business law at the UNSW Business School and the director of the UNSW Business School Cybersecurity and Data Governance Research Network. His research interests focus on competition law, the regulation of networked industries and the financial services sector with an emphasis on the effects of technology in the regulatory space. Before moving to academia, he had a thirty-year career including working for law firms and the ACCC. Dr Nicholls is an accredited mediator.