YEAR 2017

ISBN 9789897461149

Bankruptcy, Insolvency and Company Recovery

Miguel Pestana de Vasconcelos

Keywords

 Bankruptcy; Insolvency; Company Recovery

Abstract

1st Congress on Commercial Law of the Faculty of Law of the University of Porto, S. Paulo and Macau

Table of contents

The set of articles that is now printed resulted from the author's interventions at the 1st Congress on Commercial Law of the Faculty of Law of the University of Porto, São Paulo and Macau, under Bankruptcy, insolvency and company recovery.
It was a joint event of the three Faculties that took place on July 2014, at the Faculty of Law of the University of Porto. The organisers were the authors of these lines, Francisco Satiro from the Faculty of Law of the University of S. Paulo and Augusto Teixeira Garcia from the Faculty of Law of the University of Macau.
The event, aimed to share experiences from different areas of insolvency law and company recovery in the three systems, was widely successful with very high public participation and lively and enriching debates.
Scientific dialogue in the comparative sphere is central to the development of the science of law. It makes it possible to compare the normative solutions of the different systems, the doctrinal and jurisprudential developments, leading both to re-weighing similar problems, as to interpenetrations and reciprocal influences in the making of new laws.
Bankruptcy - which in the current Portuguese system corresponds to insolvency-liquidation - and company recovery constitute a field in which this dialogue is particularly justified, given its umbilical connection to economic life and its constant changes.
The interests that intersect here, which are the satisfaction of creditors and their hierarchy, the granting of a second opportunity to the debtor, the search for mechanisms that allow the maintenance of companies that, despite being insolvent or only in a difficult economic situation, are economically viable and financially recoverable, are articulated and valued differently. Sometimes, suddenly changing the law, often without underlying doctrinal work.
The balance is particularly delicate, it requires public policy guidelines, and, not less important, an accurate knowledge of the current economic and business reality.
And it touches the investment, both national and international, that all States intend to attract and develop. The absence of efficient protection for creditors, especially regarding their guarantees, reduces investment and the granting of credit itself, without which there is no economic life. But, on the other hand, the existence of guarantees, in particular if they are allowed to be executed outside the process, reaches the position of common creditors, usually weak creditors.
Many of these problems were discussed in the congress; others will deserve a future development in an upcoming event.