Bankruptcy blog

November 30, 2007

Arthur Gonzalez

Filed under: Uncategorized — admin @ 11:55 pm

The Hon. Arthur J. Gonzalez is a United States Bankruptcy Court Judge for the Southern District of New York. Gonzalez received his undergraduate degree from Fordham University in 1969. Following graduation, he worked as a New York City public school teacher until 1982. After earning a law degree, also from Fordham, Gonzalez became an attorney for the Manhattan District Counsel Office of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). He left the IRS in 1988 and worked as a private lawyer for several firms. During this period, he earned a Master of Laws from New York University (NYU). In 1991, Gonzalez re-entered government to become an Assistant United States Trustee for the Southern District of New York. He was promoted in 1993 to become Trustee for New York, Connecticut, and Vermont. Judge Gonzalez was appointed Bankruptcy Judge in 1995.


Significant Cases

Gonzalez presided over the bankruptcy proceedings for WorldCom, the largest U.S. bankruptcy case, and Enron. Both cases resulted, at least in part, from egregious fraud by the companies prior to their filing for bankruptcy.


External links

  • Official biographical profile
  • Text of opinions

Cross-language information retrieval

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: — admin @ 8:17 pm

Cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) is a subfield of information retrieval dealing with retrieving information written in a language different from the language of the user’s query. For example, a user may pose their query in English but retrieve relevant documents written in French.

The first workshop on CLIR was held in Zürich during the SIGIR-96 conference. The proceedings of this workshop can be found in the book Cross-Language Information Retrieval (Grefenstette, ed; Kluwer, 1998) ISBN 0-7923-8122-X. Workshops have been held yearly since 2000 at the meetings of the Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF).

The term “cross-language information retrieval” has many synonyms, of which the following are perhaps the most frequent: cross-lingual information retrieval, translingual information retrieval, multilingual information retrieval. The term “multilingual information retrieval” refers to CLIR in general, but it also has a specific meaning of cross-language information retrieval where a document collection is multilingual.


External links

  • Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF)
  • A resource page for CLIR


Research Groups

  • Center for Natural Language Processing at Syracuse University
  • IIT Information Retrieval Lab


See also

  • Cross Language Evaluation Forum

Reaffirmation agreement

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , — admin @ 7:35 pm

A reaffirmation agreement in United States bankruptcy law refers to an agreement made between a creditor and the debtor that waives discharge of a debt that would otherwise be discharged in the pending bankruptcy proceeding. A properly executed, timely filed reaffirmation agreement modifies the discharge such that it is rendered inoperable against the subject debt. Most statutory authority for reaffirmation agreements is codified in section 524(c) of the Bankruptcy Code.

Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1978

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The Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1978 (, , November 6, 1978) is a United States Act of Congress regulating Bankruptcy.

The current Bankruptcy Code was enacted in 1978 by § 101 of the Act which generally became effective on October 1, 1979. The current Code completely replaced the former Bankruptcy Act of 1898, sometimes called the “Nelson Act” (Act of July 1, 1898, ch. 541, ). The current Code has been since 1978. (See, e.g. Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005.)

ISPA

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: — admin @ 6:28 pm

ISPA refers to:

  • Internet Service Providers Association
  • Instrument for Structural Policies for Pre-Accession (part of the European Union Regional policy)
  • International SPA Association
  • the Portuguese Instituto Superior de Psicologia Aplicada
  • International Society of Parametric Analysts

Jack Smith (footballer born 1915)

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Jack Smith (Born: February 2nd 1915 Batley, Yorkshire, England. Died: April 21, 1975)

Jack started his career with Newcastle United before transferring to Manchester United in 1938. Officially, he is recognized as having score 15 goals for United during his career, but he also scored over 150 goals during World War II. These goals are not counted towards the official total as they are classified as “friendlies”. He would leave Manchester United in 1946.

Nerve of an open covering

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In mathematics, the nerve of an open covering is a construction in topology, of an abstract simplicial complex from an open covering of a topological space X.

Given an index set I, and open sets Ui contained in X, the nerve N is the set of finite subsets of I defined as follows:

  • the empty set belongs to N;
  • a finite set J ⊆ I belongs to N if and only if the intersection of the Ui whose subindices are in J is non-empty. That is, if and only if
<math>\bigcap_{j\in J}U_j \neq \emptyset.</math>

Obviously, if J belongs to N, then any of its subsets is also in N. Therefore N is an abstract simplicial complex.

In general, the complex N need not reflect the topology of X accurately. For example we can cover any n-sphere with two contractible sets U and V, in such a way that N is a 1-simplex. However, if we also insist that the open sets corresponding to every intersection indexed by a set in N is also contractible, the position changes. This means for instance that a circle covered by three open arcs, intersecting in pairs in one arc, is modelled by a homeomorphic complex, the geometrical realization of N.

Assistant referee

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , — admin @ 5:18 pm

Two assistant referees (previously known as linesmen) assist the referee in controlling an association football (soccer) match.

An assistant referee indicates matters to the referee (usually initially by raising his flag, but nowadays also by wireless communication devices), which the referee may then act upon. All decisions by the assistant referee are only advisory to the referee; assistants do not actually make binding decisions.

During the game one assistant referee oversees one touch-line and one end of the field utilising the diagonal system of control.

Assistant referees were formerly called linesmen. In 1996, the name change was primarily to better reflect the modern role of these officials, and secondarily to become non-gender specific. They are also sometimes incorrectly referred to as “referee’s assistants”.


General duties

Law 6 of the Laws of the Game outlines the general duties of the assistant referees, however their duties in a given game remain subject to the decision of the referee. These duties usually include indicating:

  • When the whole ball has passed outside the field of play.
  • Which side is entitled to return to the ball into the field of play.
  • When a player may be penalised for an offside offence .
  • When offences or other infringments of the Laws of the Game have been committed of which the referee does not have an adequate view.

An assistant referee may also be called upon by the referee to provide an opinion regarding matters which the referee requires clarification on. The assistant referees also usually assist the referee with substitutions, preparatory and administrative functions.


See also

  • Fourth official

LG Philips Display

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , , — admin @ 4:55 pm

LG.Philips Displays was a joint venture created by the LG Group of South Korea and Philips Electronics of the Netherlands. It primarily manufactured CRTs used in traditional television sets.

These two companies also operate another joint venture, LG.Philips LCD, which focuses on LCD panels used in flat panel television sets.

As of 2006, the company had run into bankruptcy and restarted under the same name with investements of a third party(JP Morgan). LG.Philips LCD was not affected by this bankruptcy.

LG.Philips Displays shares were sold in the beginning of March 2007. The company name has been changed to LP Displays from 1 April, 2007. LP is a historic reference to the old mothercompanies LG an Philips.

John Parke

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: — admin @ 4:45 pm

John Grubb Parke (September 22, 1827 – December 16, 1900) was a U.S. Army engineer and a Union general in the American Civil War.

Parke was born in Chester County, Pennsylvania. He graduated from the U.S. Military Academy in 1849 and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Corps of Engineers. As an engineer, he determined the boundary lines between Iowa and the Little Colorado River, surveyed routes for a railroad from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean, and was the chief surveyor of the party charged with the delineation of the boundary of the northwest United States and British North America, 1857–1861.

At the start of the Civil War, Parke was appointed brigadier general of volunteers and commanded a brigade in the operations on the North Carolina coast in early 1862. He served as chief-of-staff to Ambrose Burnside during the battles of Antietam and Fredericksburg. He assumed command of the IX Corps and was sent to the Western Theater for the Vicksburg Campaign. He was chief-of-staff in the Army of the Ohio in the defense of Knoxville and chief-of-staff to Burnside during the Overland Campaign and beginning stages of the Siege of Petersburg. After the Battle of the Crater, Burnside was relieved of command and Parke assumed command of the IX Corps. In 1865, while Army of the Potomac commander George G. Meade was in a conference, Parke being senior officer was acting commander of the army during the Battle of Fort Stedman until Meade returned to the field. He led the IX Corps through the fall of Petersburg and the Appomattox Campaign. In 1865 he was brevetted major general and retired from the Army in 1889.

Parke died in Washington, D.C. He is buried at the St. James the Less Episcopal Churchyard in Philadelphia.

Protective trust

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The Protective Trust is a form of settlement found in England and Wales and several Commonwealth countries. It has marked similarities to asset-protection trusts found in several offshore jurisdictions and US Spendthrift trusts.

In such a trust assets are ordinarily held to pay an income to the beneficiary. The beneficiary may also have access to capital of the trust with the trustee’s permission. The right to receive income from a trust would ordinarily be an asset in the hands of the beneficiary and could be sold, thwarting the intention of the donor to spread the gift over the recipient’s lifetime. Additionally on a bankruptcy the right to the income would be sold by the beneficiary’s trustee in bankruptcy.

To give protection to beneficiaries, a protective trust automatically converts into a discretionary trust, under which the beneficiary has no right to the income, if he or she does anything which breaches a condition specified in the document creating the trust.

The establishment of this discretionary trust is ordinarily exempt from the charge to UK inheritance tax on the establishment of discretionary trusts.

Such protective trusts have a longstanding history. To reduce the verbose definitions that had previously to be recited in the establishing documents of a protective trust, in England and Wales s33 of the Trustee Act 1925 (and equivalent legislation in other jurisdictions) provides that this protection will arise in any trust described as a “protective trust” in its trust deed.

Protective trusts are subject to challenge under creditor protection legislation as are any other forms of asset-protection. However many jurisdictions do not permit a trust to be broken where a debtor who remains a discretionary beneficiary only under a trust and cannot access the fund without the exercise of the trustees’ discretion in his favour.


See also

  • Asset protection

Richard George

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: — admin @ 3:12 pm

Richard George was president of Handy Andy Home Improvement Centers. He was at the helm at the time of Handy Andy’s bankruptcy on October 17, 1995, and for the company’s ultimate close in June 1996. Many blame him for not standing up to creditors’ demands to liquidate the business.

City of Legions

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , — admin @ 3:07 pm

This may refer to:

  • Caerleon in Monmouthshire
  • Chester in Cheshire
  • Some historians have also suggested it may refer to York in Yorkshire

1716 in Canada

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags: , — admin @ 2:43 pm

See also:
1715 in Canada,
other events of 1716,
1717 in Canada and the
list of ‘years in Canada’.


Events

  • Jacques Talbot came to Montreal as a schoolmaster.


Births


Deaths

Lien avoidance

Filed under: Uncategorized — admin @ 2:42 pm

In bankruptcy the debtor, by way of a Motion to Avoid Lien, can avoid certain liens that attached to the debtor’s exempt property prior to the filing of the bankruptcy petition. This action is often used to clear title to land from a judgment lien arising out of pre-petition activity in a state court.

Florida Coastal Airlines

Filed under: Uncategorized — admin @ 2:34 pm

Florida Coastal Airlines (FCA) was an airline based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, USA. It operated services in Florida and the Bahamas. It was declared bankrupt and ceased services in 2006.

Contents


Code Data

  • IATA Code: PA
  • ICAO Code: FCL
  • Callsign: Florida Coastal


History

The airline ceased most flight operations in February 2006 and filed a Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition on February 21, 2006, but the petition was not immediately accepted by the court and its status and effect are not clear at this time.<ref>US Department of Transportation retrieved 16 May 2007</ref>

As of January 3, 2007, most of the telephone numbers on their web site have “disconnected” recordings. The one number that answers with a Florida Coastal Airlines recording says they are not currently providing any service. Some of the Florida Coastal Airlines fleet is stored with and being maintained by Lynx Airlines at Fort Lauderdale Hollywood International Airport. It is believed that Lynx Airlines will acquire the carrier from Bankruptcy.


Fleet

FCA operated a fleet of 5 Cessna 402C aircraft.


External links

  • Florida Coastal Airlines


References

<references/>

Statutes of Canada

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The Statutes of Canada (S.C.) consists of the compilation of all the federal laws of Canada passed by the parliament of Canada since Confederation in 1867. The Revised Statutes of Canada (R.S.C.) is the consolidation of the Statutes of Canada incorporating amendments and Acts that have been added since the last revision. Thus far there have been six revisions: in 1886, 1906, 1927, 1952, 1970, and 1985.


See also

  • Canada Gazette

Debt restructuring

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Debt restructuring is a plan for business, which is made to make possible to continue business operation without danger from debt. It is usually cheaper and safer than bankruptcy. The only cost associated with a business debt restructuring is the time to negotiate with bankers, creditors, tax authorities and suppliers.

In United States, during debt restructuring, debts on average receive a 45% discount. Chapter 11 bankruptcy costs at least $50,000 in lawyer and court fees, with costs over $100,000 common. By some measures, only 20% of firms survive Chapter 11 filing.<ref>Buljevich, Esteban C.,Cross Border Debt Restructuring: Innovative Approaches for Creditors, Corporate and Sovereigns ISBN 1-84374-194-6</ref>


Debt-for-equity swap

In a debt-for-equity swap, a business’ creditors agree to cancel some or all of its debt in exchange for equity in the business.<ref>http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9843095/ Eurotunnel on target for January debt deal</ref>

Debt for equity deals often occur when large companies run into severe financial trouble, and often result in these projects being owned by their bankers. This is because both the debt and the remaining assets in these projects are so large that there is no advantage to the banks to drive the project into bankruptcy, and they prefer to take control of the business as a going concern.

The shareholding of the original shareholders of the company is generally significantly diluted in these deals.


References