The State Ministry of Justice of Northrhine - Westphalia (Germany) has initiated an "International Exchange of Experience on Insol¬vency Law" (IEEI). The purpose of the IEEI is the informal, mainly e¬mail - based exchange of ideas and information on international in¬solvency law and the national insolvency law systems... Co-operation and exchange of experience on the international level are equally nec¬essary in the area of insolvency law as worth while... The topic of this symposium, Bankruptcy in the Global Village: The Second Decade, is grand and demanding. By referring to bankruptcy in the global village it seems to imply something different from the techni¬calities of particular national laws such as, for instance, those from Ja¬pan, the United States, or Germany; instead, what appears to be meant is an understanding of bankruptcy as a term that transcends the national boundaries—something like the essence of bankruptcy law or its meta-level...

Consider the following: there is a 'bad guy' head of a state who borrows money in the name of the state he is representing from another state or a bank. Is the debt resulting from this credit void? Or: is it legal to have a state pay back loans which had been taken by such a bad guy and been used by him to buy, inter alia, weap¬ons with which he had killed, inter alia, members of the families the survivors of which are now bound to repay those loans through their taxes? Very emotional questions, indeed...

The Eurofood decision of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) was long awaited as what quite a number of commentators expected to be the ''last clearing word'' on the issue of what constitutes the notorious ''centre of main interests'' (COMI) pursuant to Art.3(l) of the EC Regulation on insolvency proceedings (1346/2000) (hereafter referred to as EIR). After Advocate General Jacob's Opinion1 it actually did not come as a real surprise that the court itself did not open its mind to the need for modern insolvency law to develop a particular set of rules for the insolvencies of a group of companies...

Act on financial operations, insolvency proceedings and involuntary liquidation proceedings (i.e. the Insolvency Act) has been enacted by the Law No. 6413/2007, published in Official Gazette No. 126 (31 December 2007). The Insolvency Act is in force from 15 January 2008...Classic bankruptcy law is today replaced by insolvency law that can be defined as the set of legal rules determining the contents of relations related to substantive judicial proceedings laws appearing when debtor comes into financial troubles threatening (violating) creditor's interest to get (full) repayment of its claims from such debtor. Namely, the essence of the bankruptcy is to distribute the property of insolvent debtor among his creditors in as just and orderly manner as possible...

Article 3.1 of the Insolvency Regulation: The courts of the Member State within the territory of which the centre of a debtor's main interests is situated shall have jurisdiction to open insolvency proceedings. In the case of a company or legal person, the place of the registered office shall be presumed to be the centre of its main interests in the absence of proof to the contrary...

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