The offer was granted after a competitive selection mechanism, and Dr Eugenio Vaccari was awarded a €2,000 grant to cover the travel and accommodation costs

Dr Eugenio Vaccari and Prof Danilo Semeghini are pleased to announce that they will be working on a research project provisionally titled: “A Modular Approach to Restructuring and Insolvency Law: Post-Petition Financing, Termination Clauses and Onerous Contracts in England and Italy”.

Both Italy and the United Kingdom have recently introduced significant reforms to their corporate insolvency frameworks. Italy has enacted a new insolvency code, known as the Codice della Crisi e dell’Insolvenza. The U.K. has enacted several wide-ranging reforms, including the Corporate Insolvency and Governance Act 2020 and the Administration (Restrictions on Disposal etc to Connected Persons) Regulations 2021. These laws aim at promoting a debtor-friendly and rescue-oriented approach to corporate restructuring and liquidation. Yet, the statutory provisions may not be properly aligned to achieve these goals.

The overarching research question of this project is to determine the extent to which the reformed English and Italian insolvency laws pursue a modular approach to corporate restructuring and liquidation, by offering a range of efficient and cost-effective solutions to financial distress, with the view of making regulatory recommendation to improve the restructuring and insolvency toolkit of these countries. As this question is too broad to be investigated in details in an academic study, the proposed research will focus on the analysis of the statutory provisions relating to the treatment of key contracts in insolvency and restructuring procedures.

Dr Eugenio Vaccari will present the results of his studies both through ad hoc seminaries for professors and students, and through publications in the online working paper series of the Department, and in an open-access paper to be published in a peer-reviewed academic journal. The University of Milano Bicocca is a public university based in Milan (Italy). It is one of the top-ranking universities in Italy, and it has consistently ranked among the best 300 universities in the world for the quality of their teaching and research.