The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) announced in June that it was considering launching an investigation into the UK airports market "with a view to establishing if the current market structure works well for consumers". This raised a number of eyebrows in the City, as the European Commission had only just cleared Ferrovial's bid for BAA, confirming that the market (at least for ground-handling services) "is broadly perceived as well-functioning by airlines" ...
The Office of Fair Trading (OFT) announced in June that it was considering launching an investigation into the UK airports market "with a view to establishing if the current market structure works well for consumers". This raised a number of eyebrows in the City, as the European Commission had only just cleared Ferrovial's bid for BAA, confirming that the market (at least for ground-handling services) "is broadly perceived as well-functioning by airlines" ...
BACKGROUND Complexities arise when arranging financings to co-investment structures, especially if the credit support includes security over shares granted by some (but not all) of the shareholders ...
Outsourcing is not a new phenomenon. As business processes become more complex and costly many Irish companies are concentrating on their core activities and handing over responsibility for running expensive systems and managing large numbers of employees to expert third parties, for an agreed price. Irish companies are also increasingly outsourcing for strategic reasons, looking to leverage the specialist expertise of service providers to open new product and market opportunities ...
The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (the "Second Circuit") recently affirmed a broad reading of the safe harbor of United States Bankruptcy Code (the "Bankruptcy Code") section 546(e), which protects from avoidance both "margin payments" and "settlement payments" as well as transfers made in connection with a "securities contract ...
The flight to quality in the UK’s commercial real estate market has been covered extensively over recent months. Nowhere is this shift being felt more acutely than in the office sector. According to Cushman & Wakefield, take-up of Grade A office space in Central London reached 2.44m sq ft during the first half of 2023 - increasing by 7 per cent on the five-year H1 average. There are many factors driving this shift ...
The issue of offensive trade marks rumbles on.In 2017, the landmark US decision in Matal v Tam came after the founder of an Asian-American rock group sought trade mark registration for the band’s name, The Slants. The US Patent and Trademark Office (the “USPTO”) refused the application on the basis that the trade mark was offensive ...
On 24 February 2021, Hong Kong’s Finance Secretary Paul Chan delivered the 2021-22 Budget which highlighted upcoming government initiatives to promote the establishment of and re-domiciliation of offshore funds to Hong Kong using the Hong Kong open-ended fund company structure (OFC) ...
The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) updated its "frequently asked questions" (FAQs) Tuesday, providing guidance relating to the sanctions against Tornado Cash, the Ethereum “mixer” it blacklisted in August, following allegations that North Korea used Tornado Cash to launder stolen digital assets ...
What lies in the new frontier of investment regulation? On May 26, the New York Times reported that the US Justice Department had dropped investigations into three US senators’ stock trades conducted shortly after they had been privately briefed on the novel coronavirus in January. The politicians had dumped millions of dollars of shares in Exxon Mobil, tech giants and real estate companies, some of which later lost value when markets plunged ...
On March 30, 2022, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision in Oertwich v. Traditional Village Of Togiak, No. 19-36029 (9th Cir.) that has potential implications for tribal sovereign immunity, including recognizing that tribal sovereign immunity extends to tortious conduct occurring on non-tribal lands. Ronald Oertwich (“Oertwich”) was a non-tribal member living in the City of Togiak, Alaska (the “City”) ...
On 6 October 2022, as part of the ongoing work of the OECD/G20 Inclusive Framework (“IF”) on Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (“BEPS”) to implement the Two-Pillar solution to address the tax challenges arising from the digitalisation of the economy, the OECD released its progress report for comment. Background The report was prepared for the purposes of obtaining further input from stakeholders on the administration and tax certainty aspects of Amount A ...
It is clear that government restrictions and trading difficulties have created an environment in which existing transfer pricing policies will not always be appropriate. The OECD has done well to reach rapid consensus among its members on four key transfer pricing topics, namely: comparability analysis, losses and the allocation of COVID-19-specific costs, government assistance programmes and advance pricing agreements (APAs) ...
The Director of Corporate Enforcement is targeting company directors who abandon insolvent companies and leave them to be involuntarily struck off the Register as an alternative to a formal liquidation. The Director has indicated that he will take proceedings under Section 160 of the Companies Act, 1990 to secure disqualification orders against such directors in appropriate cases. He is getting support for this in the High Court ...
In our final quarterly case law update for 2021, we look at some of the key cases published since July 2021 and consider the lessons we can learn from them. Furlough and redundancy As a result of the backlog within the Employment Tribunal system, we are only just starting to see the Tribunal making decisions on the actions taken by employers during the pandemic, specifically in their use of furlough under the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS) ...
The Ohio Department of Health (“ODH”) has released the applications for both skilled and non-medical home healthcare licenses, which are now required pursuant to H.B. 110, now codified as R.C. 3740 et. sec. Agencies providing skilled home health care, nonmedical home health/personal care services, and non-agency providers of nonmedical home health/personal care services will be required to be licensed starting October 1, 2022 ...
Questions abound as to whether HIPAA comes into play when COVID-19 vaccination information is provided to employers. Recently, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office for Civil Rights (OCR) issued clarifying guidance on the applicability of the HIPAA Privacy Rule in the context of COVID-19 vaccination information provided to employers ...
Occupational Health and Safety Act – important notification of draft Ergonomics Regulations, 2017On Friday, 27 January 2017, a notice (GNR.64) was published in Government Gazette No. 40578, in terms of which the Minster of Labour gave notice of her intention to make Ergonomics Regulations in terms of the Occupational Health and Safety Act, 1993 ...
By Michael Flynn Under the long-recognized valid when made doctrine, if a loan was not subject to a state usury law when it was made, it does not subsequently become even if it is subsequently sold or assigned to another party. The doctrine long was applied by courts and utilized in secondary market sales, but its application to a non-bank purchaser was rejected by the Second Circuit in 2015 in Madden v. Midland Funding, LLC ...
On 28 January 2013 the «Diário da República» (official gazette) published a set of measures1 - that came into force the following day - to improve and streamline the special scheme2 for granting a Portuguese ‘investment residence permit’ (“IRP”) to foreign nationals to enable them to make certain investments in the country ...
What is your outlook for Chinese businesses and investment as we approach the end of 2021? China is, and will continue to be, the strongest market for offshore law firms in Asia. China's outbound investment activity has been subdued since 2016, due to domestic constraints on outbound capital flows and tighter scrutiny of Chinese investments abroad ...
On July 21, 2021, the SEC’s Division of Examinations (the Division) issued a Risk Alert detailing more than 20 examinations of investment advisers who engaged in cross trades, principal trades, or both, involving fixed-income securities as part of the Division’s FIX Initiative. The July 21, 2021, Risk Alert is a follow-up to the Sept ...
On 1 December 2017, the Minister of Economic Development announced the release of the Competition Amendment Bill, 2017 (the “Competition Bill”) for public comment. Following the closure of the period for public comments in the first quarter of 2018, a revised Competition Bill (the “Revised Competition Bill”) was tabled before Parliament on 11 July 2018 ...
