Ilya Kokorin wins Gold Medal for the III 2020 Prize in International Insolvency Studies
Ilya Kokorin, Meijers PhD candidate at the Department of Financial Law, has been awarded the Gold Medal in the prestigious competition of the International Insolvency Institute (III), the 2020 Prize in International Insolvency Studies.
The III Prize is awarded for original legal research, commentary or analysis on topics of international insolvency and restructuring significance and on comparative international analysis of domestic insolvency and restructuring issues and developments.
In addition to the monetary prize, Ilya is invited to attend the International Insolvency Institute’s annual conference to be held in Sao Paulo, Brazil in 2021 and present his research. He is also granted membership in the NextGen Leadership Program’s Class IX.
Ilya’s winning article is titled “Intra-group financial support in a crisis: between rescue and abuse”. In this article he shows that current insolvency rules applicable to intra-group financial transactions (e.g. intra-group loans and cross-guarantees) greatly vary among European jurisdictions and may generally disincentivise value creating financial support in times when it is most needed. The recently adopted EU Restructuring Directive (2019/1023), while bringing some harmonisation to the otherwise diverging transaction avoidance rules, and supporting rescue financing, does not alleviate this complexity, but may actually worsen it. By relying on the principle-based approach and taking the EU bank recovery and resolution framework as a reference point, Ilya proposes supplementing the existing European regulatory regime with special rules designed to facilitate intra-group financial support, while establishing necessary safeguards against (group) opportunistic behaviour. Ilya’s article primarily concentrates on the EU area. Nevertheless, its findings are of equal relevance for the treatment of global enterprise groups, with EU and non-EU group entities facing financial distress and requiring group-wide crisis prevention and resolution.
Ilya’s article acquires additional topicality in light of the economic carnage of Covid-19. As more and more enterprise groups experience financial (liquidity) problems and may ultimately face insolvency, clear rules enabling intra-group financial support become paramount.
For more information about 2020 III Prize in International Insolvency Studies and other submissions, see https://www.iiiglobal.org/2020prize