Assessing the legality of coercive restructuring tactics in uk exchange offers

This article discusses bondholder exchange offers, a useful private debtrestructuring technique. In a typical offer, an under-performing issuer will seek to exchange its old bonds for new bonds with economically less favourable terms to bondholders, thus deleveraging the issuer without the difficulties of a formal insolvency process. Some issuers seek to incentivise their bondholders to accept these new, less favourable bonds by using coercive tactics, such as ‘exit consents’ and ‘covenant strips’. While lawful in the US, the English courts have only recently considered them for the first time in relation to English Law bonds. The Assénagon case declared an egregious coercive tactic invalid on the basis of an old company law principle, casting doubt on the validity of other coercive tactics. This principle (the’abuse principle’) originally restricted the abuse of minority shareholders by the majority, but is now also applicable to debt security voting arrangements. This article examines the abuse principle through the cases and discusses its potential application to other forms of coercive tactics in exchange offers. The article argues that where a coercive tactic is used purely to compel bondholders to exchange their bonds, this will contravene the abuse principle. The use of coercive tactics may however still be consistent with the abuse principle and Assénagon. An issuer will need to show that ‘reasonable men’ could see the tactic as beneficial for the class of bondholders, even though its use might adversely affect non-exchanging bondholders. A potential permissible example is a covenant strip that removes a restriction on asset disposals in order to facilitate a disposal pursuant to a restructuring

On Lorentz spacetimes of constant curvature

We describe in parallel the Lorentzian homogeneous spaces $G=\mathrm{PSL}(2,\mathbb{R})$ and $\mathfrak{g}=\mathfrak{psl}(2,\mathbb{R})$, and review some recent results relating the geometry of their quotients by discrete groups.Comment: 16 pages, 2 figures. Appeared in the Proceedings of the December 2012 conference "Groups, Geometry, Dynamics" (Almora, India). Editors: C.S. Aravinda, W.M. Goldman, K. Gongopadhyay, A. Lubotzky, Mahan Mj, A. Weave

On the block wavelet transform applied to the boundary element method

This paper follows an earlier work by Bucher et al. [1] on the application of wavelet transforms to the boundary element method, which shows how to reuse models stored in compressed form to solve new models with the same geometry but arbitrary load cases - the so-called virtual assembly technique. The extension presented in this paper involves a new computational procedure created to perform the required two-dimensional wavelet transforms by blocks, theoretically allowing the compression of matrices of arbitrary size. Details of the computer implementation that allows the use of this methodology for very large models or at high compression ratios are given. A numerical application shows a standard PC being used to solve a 131,072 DOF model, previously compressed, for 100 distinct load cases in less than 1 hour – or 33 seconds for each load case

Stress relaxation in a perfect nanocrystal by coherent ejection of lattice layers

We show that a small crystal trapped within a potential well and in contact with its own fluid, responds to large compressive stresses by a novel mechanism -- the transfer of complete lattice layers across the solid-fluid interface. Further, when the solid is impacted by a momentum impulse set up in the fluid, a coherently ejected lattice layer carries away a definite quantity of energy and momentum, resulting in a sharp peak in the calculated phonon absorption spectrum. Apart from its relevance to studies of stability and failure of small sized solids, such coherent nanospallation may be used to make atomic wires or monolayer films.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures, published version, changed conten