The EU Council Regulation (EC) Nº. 1346/2000 of 29 May 2000 on insolvency proceedings, which entered into force on 31 May 2002, entitles the liquidator appointed by a court of a EU member state to seize and remove the debtor´s assets from the territory in which they are situated. Since such act requires recognition of the foreign bankruptcy judgement, the local judge will have to be asked to authorize this proceeding. Recognition takes place with no further formality, since all that needs to be done is ´transforming´ the foreign judgement into a local executive title.
In a recent procedure initiated by Bressers Law seeking execution of a number of Dutch bankruptcy judgements, the Alicante Court of Appeal has given a decision on the competent Spanish court to deal with such foreign Insolvencies executions. The plaintiff needed the Appeal Court to rule, since both the regular Court of 1st Instance and the Commercial court had denied competence. Due to the huge workload in Spanish courts, judges use the most insignificant doubts on competence to forward a case to a colleague. However, this case indeed suffered from some serious contradictions between the Spanish procedure law and Regulation 44/2001, to which the Regulation on Insolvency proceedings refers.
By judgement of 10 June 2009 the Alicante Appeal Court finally clarified the matter: the regular Court of 1st Instance (Juzgado de Primera Instancia) is the competent one. |
