The Restructuring Plan (RP), as introduced under the Corporate Insolvency and Governance Act 2020 (CIGA), offers a new powerful and flexible court supervised restructuring tool, which has the real potential to reshape the UK restructuring landscape in the coming few years. Traditionally, companies that find themselves in financial difficulties with competing stakeholders have turned to Company Voluntary Arrangements (CVAs) or Schemes of Arrangement (SoAs) to assist in de-leveraging and other corporate recovery exercises. However, with the increased scrutiny over the implementation of CVAs (particularly in the context of retailers seeking rent reductions from landlords in recent years and the associated high-profile failures), twinned with the high risk of challenge SoAs face, this paper suggests that RPs may now offer a much more flexible route to overcoming the many current challenges businesses face – a more pertinent than ever requirement as many enterprises seek to rise from the ashes of the coronavirus pandemic or adapt to new business models, while opportunistic investors may use RPs to gain control more readily of such businesses (whether in the UK or elsewhere). RPs can be combined with the shielding assistance of the new moratorium procedure and/or a traditional administration insolvency process in order to buy time for an RP to be negotiated with relevant stakeholders.

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