Raphael Nach filed suit in US District Court in the Northern District of Illinois alleging Moody’s CEO made false and misleading statements and assigned excessively high ratings to certain subprime mortgage backed bonds, Edvard Pettersson of Bloomberg writes in his column Moody’s Finance Chief Sued by Investor Over Subprime Ratings. This is another of the [...]
July 2007
The Bankruptcy Court in Massachusetts In re Mark J. Paulding, — B.R. —-, 2007 WL 1783867 (Bkrtcy.D.Mass. 2007) recently reviewed the law on reversing fraudulently conveyed property. An example of a fraudulent conveyance is the “I’ll transfer my house to my wife for a dollar” scenario. People who do this usually do so because of [...]
When a person files for bankruptcy, the instant the person files–an estate is created. The Bankruptcy Court appoints a “trustee” to be in charge of the estate. The Chapter 7 Trustee has many responsibilities: looking over the schedules of assets and liabilites that the person has filed; reviewing the exemptions used by the person, checking [...]
Clients invariably ask, “Should I file bankruptcy?” Though it might be less than polite, I want to ask them, “What do you propose to do if you don’t file bankruptcy”. Most Americans want desperately not to file bankruptcy but the simple arithmetic of their income, their assets, and their debts dictate that they cannot realistically [...]
The US Trustee, the government agency that oversees all bankruptcy case filings, issued a nine page summary interpreting Bankruptcy Form 22C, the form that is used to calculate Current Monthly Income and Disposable Income in Chapter 13 bankruptcy cases. Disposable Income is the amount of money a debtor must pay to unsecured creditors. This summary [...]
Californians get a choice between two distinct exemption schemes when they file bankruptcy. The state law system has a large homestead exemption for homeowners; the California bankruptcy exemptions provides a wildcard, or grubstake, exemption that can protect cash, stock or anything else of value. Bankruptcy law allows the debtor to keep assets that are exempt [...]
