Description

As a young piece of legislation, there are many unanswered questions in China’s Enterprise Bankruptcy Law. The need to address these issues has become more urgent and pressing as China’s economy restructures and upgrades and the Chinese government encourages market-based solutions to restructure insolvent SOEs. Drawing on his rich and varied experience as a former bankruptcy court judge and current bankruptcy practitioner and bankruptcy lawyer, Chi Weihong will shed light on the distribution of power and the jostling for advantages between the different stakeholders in China’s bankruptcy procedures. He will explain that this is a dynamic process that needs to be understood against several shifts in trends, from bankruptcy judge authoritarianism to party autonomy and from bankruptcy administrator centrism to creditors and investors-centrism, which reflect the increasingly important role that bankruptcy lawyers play in the most recent reforms and developments of bankruptcy law in China.

About The Speaker

Mr. Chi Weihong, Master of Laws, Xiamen University, is an arbitrator of the Shenzhen international arbitration court and a Senior Partner and the Head of Bankruptcy and Restructuring of Tiantong & Partners Law Firm. Mr. Chi is a researcher of the Bankruptcy Law Research Center, Renmin University and an adjunct professor of the Lawyers’ College at Renmin University and Xiamen University Law School and a researcher of Legal Theory and Practice Research Center of Sun Yat-sen University School of Law. Mr. Chi was a Chief Judge, Liquidation & Bankruptcy Court of Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court (2006-February 2016), a member of the Enterprise Bankruptcy Law Judicial Interpretation Drafting Committee for the Supreme People’s Court and a member of the reorganization information platform construction team of the Supreme People’s Court.

The teams led by Mr. Chi have been appointed administrator or legal counsel in many big and complex bankruptcies of listed companies and large enterprises, including Lutianhua and Northeast Special Steel Group, which was the largest bankruptcy in China in 2017 with debts exceeding RMB70 billion.