Description

This is one of the most fundamental questions in company law. Usually it is answered by saying that companies must be run for the benefit of shareholders. But the recent decision of the UK Supreme Court – in BTI 2014 LLC v Sequana SA [2022] UKSC 25 – provides a new lens on that question. It examines it in the context of a company being financially distressed and thus potentially trading not at the expense of shareholders but creditors. The lecture will discuss why creditors provide a rare example of a case where shareholders’ interests may be displaced by those of another group.

PROGRAMME

4.30PM     Registration

4.50PM     All guests to be seated

5.00PM     Welcome Speech by Professor Andrew Simester, (Dean, NUS Law)

5.05PM     Speech by Guest-of-Honour, Chief Justice Sundaresh Menon

5.10PM     Lecture by The Right Hon Lady Mary Arden of Heswall DBE

6.10PM     Q&A Session moderated by Sushma Jobanputra, (Partner In Charge – Jones Day Singapore)

6.40PM     Dinner Reception

BIO OF THE RIGHT HON LADY ARDEN OF HESWALL DBE

Lady Arden became a Justice of the Supreme Court in October 2018 and retired in January 2022.

Lady Arden grew up in Liverpool. She read law at Girton College Cambridge and Harvard Law School. Called to the Bar in 1971, she became a Queen’s Counsel in 1986 and served as Attorney General of the Duchy of Lancaster between 1991 and 1993. She served on the Court of Appeal of England and Wales from 2000 to 2018.

Her judicial career began in 1993 when she was appointed to the High Court of Justice of England and Wales as the first woman judge assigned to the Chancery Division. Alongside her judicial experience, she has written extensively on how the law keeps pace with social change. Her two-volume book Shaping Tomorrow’s Law was published by Oxford University Press in 2015. It drew strongly on her knowledge of law reform, which she began to develop while serving as Chair of the Law Commission of England and Wales from 1996 to 1999. From 1999 to 2001, she was a member of the DTI’s Steering Group on Company Law Reform and its recommendations were implemented by the UK’s Companies Act 2006.

Between 2005 and September 2018, Lady Arden was Judge in Charge and Head of International Judicial Relations for England and Wales. She organised bilateral exchanges between the senior judiciary of the UK and the judiciaries of leading national and supranational courts overseas. She became a Member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague in 2011 and an ad hoc UK judge of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

In February 2023, Lady Arden was appointed a member of the UK’s Committee on Standards in Public Life.

BIO OF SUSHMA JOBANPUTRA (CHAIRPERSON)

Sushma Jobanputra, the Partner-in-Charge of Jones Day’s Singapore Office, has been advising clients for more than three decades on banking, restructuring, and corporate matters. She has practiced in London, Toronto, Paris, and Singapore, and her practice includes structured, acquisition, and trade finance as well as direct lending and cross-border debt restructuring across Asia, including Singapore, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Vietnam, and the Philippines.

Sushma’s financial institution clients include MUFG Bank, DBS Bank, JBIC, BNP Paribas, and Société Générale. She also has represented a significant number of corporate clients and funds, including IBM, Procter & Gamble, Hyatt Corporation, Godrej Group, Micron Technology, Temasek, Greystar, OMERS, Oxford Properties, ARA, L Catterton, Boeing Corporation, Chevron Corporation and the Tata Group.

Before joining Jones Day, Sushma was a managing director at Barclays Capital, heading a team in the structured transactions department, with responsibility on behalf of the bank for the execution of all large complex structured transactions with other financial institutions and multinationals. Prior to that she was a partner at a Magic Circle firm in London, where her practice focused on structured and acquisition finance.