Cormac Devlin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)
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111. To ask the Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation the work that the Company Law Review Group has been asked to carry out for his Department with regard to examining changes to company law with respect to insolvent companies and related commitments in the Programme for Government; the estimated timetable; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [20217/20]

Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael)
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I have asked the Company Law Review Group to examine changes to company law in respect of rescue for small businesses and three commitments from the Programme for Government.

Firstly, I wrote to the CLRG on the 8th of July asking it to examine the issue of corporate rescue for SMEs and micro-enterprises under the following terms of reference:

1. Examine and make recommendation as to how the statutory scheme of arrangement provisions of the Companies Act 2014 might be adapted to provide a rescue framework for SMEs.

2. Examine and make recommendation as to ways in which key elements of the examinership process, including a stay on enforcement  proceedings and a cross-class cram-down, might be incorporated into a rescue framework for SMEs.

3. Other EU Member States provide for voluntary restructuring processes, with a strong emphasis on creditor agreement.  Examine and make recommendation as to whether such a process is desirable in an Irish context with particular emphasis on the French framework (mandate ad hoc procedure).

4. Any other recommendations the CLRG consider appropriate.

I expect the CLRG’s report by early October.

In addition to this, as part of the CLRG’s Work Programme for 2020 - 2022 I will ask that they examine as a priority, the following specific commitments from the Programme for Government:

- review whether the current legal provisions surrounding collective redundancies and the liquidation of companies protect the rights of workers effectively;

- review the Companies Act 2014 with a view to addressing the practice of trading entities splitting their operations between trading and property with the result being the trading business, including the jobs, go into insolvency and the assets are taken out of the original business; and

- examine the legal provision that pertains to any sale to a connected party following the insolvency of a company including who can object and the allowable grounds of an objection.

I recognise that there have been earlier reviews of these issues, including in the CLRG’s 2017 Report on the Protection of Employees and Unsecured Creditors and in the Duffy-Cahill report of 2016. I will be asking the CLRG to undertake an expedited review, taking account of this previous work, and considering recommendations in the light of the economic challenges we now face.

I will be asking the Group, which operates on a voluntary basis, to make recommendations by the end of the year. When this work concludes, the Government will be ready to act and propose legislation, where this can achieve improvements.

I intend to send the final Work Programme to the Chairperson of the CLRG very shortly.