European Insolvency Law: Reform and Harmonisation, Gerard McCormack, Andrew Keay and Sarah Brown (2016, Elgar, Cheltenham), xvi and 487pp, £95, ISBN 978‐1‐78643‐330‐5

• Date: 01 December 2017
• Published date: 01 December 2017
• Author: Paul Omar
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/iir.1287

Book Review

European Insolvency Law: Reform and

Harmonisation, Gerard McCormack, Andrew

Keay and Sarah Brown (2016, Elgar,

Cheltenham), xvi and 487pp, £95, ISBN 978-

1-78643-330-5

Paul Omar*

Gray’s Inn, Barrister (np), London, UK

The European Union’s interest in insolvency matters is long-standing, with the ini-

tiative (such as it was) dating back to 1968 when work began on a convention an-

cillary to the development of the single market in the field of jurisdiction and

recognition and enforcement of judgements. The part of the project that envisaged

commercial judgments went on to produce the Brussels Convention 1968, since

readopted in the form of a regulation.

1

The thornier subject of insolvency judge-

ments fell within the scope of a hived-off working party, whose many drafts over

the intervening decades succeeded in producing the European Bankruptcy Con-

vention 1995, unfortunately derailed by the UK’s noncooperation during a dispute

with the European institutions. Ultimately, a revived experiment succeeded in the

enactment in 2000 of the European Insolvency Regulation (‘EIR 2000’).

2

The EIR 2000 confounded expectations, becoming an integral component of

domestic and cross-border practice, a generator of thousands of judgements and

the focus of academic interest and a prodigious literature dissecting its impact

and function. It also had an unintended consequence, adding to the pressures on

domestic systems facing periodic financial crises and ‘losing out’to more

established systems with optimal outcomes for stakeholders through a form of

COMI-game enabled by a flexible definition of the term and abetted by the inge-

nuity of insolvency office holders. The same economic factors and the difficulties

faced by its members have also prompted the European Union to take an interest

in substantive insolvency alongside the process, beginning in 2012, that saw the

*E-mail: khaemwaset@yahoo.co.uk 1. Council Regulation (EC) 44/2001, itself later recast as Reg-

ulation (EU) 1215/2012.

2. Council Regulation (EC) 1346/2000.

Copyright © 2017 INSOL International and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd Int. Insolv. Rev., Vol. 26: 348–350 (2017)

Published online 24 August 2017 in Wiley Online Library

(wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI: 10.1002/iir.1287