Rescue of Business in Europe European Law Institute (eds) (Part I) Bob Wessels, Stephan Madaus and Gert‐Jan Boon (eds) (part II) (2020, OUP, Oxford, UK) 1504 pp., £295, ISBN 978‐0‐19882‐652‐1

• Author: Paul Omar
• Published date: 01 June 2020
• Date: 01 June 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/iir.1385

BOOK REVIEW

Rescue of Business in Europe

European Law Institute (eds) (Part I)

Bob Wessels jStephan Madaus jGert-Jan Boon (eds) (part II)

(2020, OUP, Oxford, UK) 1504 pp., £295, ISBN 978-0-19882-652-1

Conceived in the wake of the Global Financial Crisis, the project, from which this text takes its

title, set out to survey the legal landscape in 13 jurisdictions across Europe. It did so on the basis

of a very elaborate and comprehensive questionnaire addressed to national reporters drawn

from eminent academics and practitioners in the field of insolvency and restructuring. The

detail of the questionnaire, in the shape of a template put together with great skill, offers the

possibility of gathering an enormous amount of information across the gamut of procedures

and processes in the field, together with fine detail on the position and roles of stakeholders as

well as data on how institutions and support structures underpinning function in reality. The

fruits of the 3½year project can be seen in the work that has just been published, just as the

world now slides into another crisis, this time occasioned not by greed or speculation, but by

nature in the form of a pandemic. Arguably, the text comes at a critical point, as national gov-

ernments, not just in Europe, but the world over, are putting into place measures reacting to

attacks on systemic integrity occasioned by the crisis, just as they had to do from 2008 onwards.

The book, weighing in at over 1,500 pages, is divided into two parts. The first, edited by the

European Law Institute (ELI), under whose auspices the project was initiated, presents the

115 recommendations formally adopted by that organisation in 2017 in the shape of the ELI

Business Rescue Instrument. The ELI's mission is, inter alia, to facilitate the type of research

that can provide practical guidance building towards European legal integration and improved

law reform. This project, in particular, responded to a Resolution of the European Parliament

in 2011 calling on European institutions to present new texts to enhance the strength of the

insolvency framework, particularly addressing its cross-border context as well as resilience in

crafting procedures to anticipate the consequences of financial distress. That work has led to,

inter alia, the revision of the European Insolvency Regulation (Regulation 2015/848) as well as

the more recent adoption of the Preventive Restructuring Directive (Directive 2019/1024).

Assessing the long-term viability of such measures, the project's role was to gather the nec-

essary information to be able to make recommendations that could inform the shape of future

initiatives. In fact, the recommendations, which are structured as part of an Instrument adopted

by the organisation, contain suggested solutions on a wide range of matters connected to the

themes of restructuring and insolvency. The formal launch of the instrument and the recom-

mendations it contained took place to coincide with the 52nd Session of UNCITRAL Working

Group V (Insolvency) in Vienna at an event organised on December 20, 2017 at the Austrian

Ministry of Justice.

Received: 23 May 2019 Accepted: 24 May 2020

DOI: 10.1002/iir.1385

© 2020 INSOL International and John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Int Insolv Rev. 2020;29:315–316. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/iir 315