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

The synthesis of speech using a digital computer

Thesis (B.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Physics, 1959.MIT copy bound with: Ground state reaction energy determination for K⁴¹(p,α)A³⁸ / Robert William Bird and Theodore Neil Divine. 1959.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 16-18).by Robert Peel Futrelle.B.S

A quantitative analysis of the relationship between the 12 components of the Index of Economic Freedom (IEF) and the Human Development Index (HDI) scores within the 16 Southern African Development Community (SADC) nations

Nations in Sub-Saharan Africa tend to experience some of the worst levels of human development and economic freedom in the world. Previous research has shown that there is a positive and significant correlation between these two macroeconomic facets. Further research has shown that if nations' policy-makers can manage their resources and capabilities appropriately, then this could improve their economic freedom and human development levels. This study aims to analyse the relationship between the scores of the 12 different components of the Index of Economic Freedom (IEF) and the overall Human Development Index (HDI) scores of Sub-Saharan African nations. The specific selection of nations utilised in the study are the 16 countries that make up the Southern African Development Community (SADC). Based on a review of the literature on human development, economic freedom, and the Resource Based Theory (RBT) on a macro-level, a correlational study was conducted to determine the relationship between the relevant variables. The information was collected from the Heritage Foundation and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), respectively. The data and scores collected and used in the study are from the years 2015 to 2019. The correlational results demonstrated that nine of the 12 components of the IEF has a positive and significant correlation with HDI within the selected African nations. The strongest correlation being between 'Property Rights' and HDI. Therefore, it is likely that if the property rights within a nation are upheld, said nation would have higher levels of human development. The three components that proved to have an insignificant result with HDI were; 'Tax Burden', 'Government Spending', and 'Fiscal Health'. The results indicate that all components that fall under the category of 'Government Size' share no significant correlational relationship with human development. It is recommended that governments and policy-makers take this into consideration when managing their resources and capabilities to improve the nation's human development. Further research is required to identify the specifics on how this management and allocation of resources can be utilised effectively to improve the human development and economic freedom in Sub-Saharan Africa.Thesis (MBA) -- Faculty of Commerce, Rhodes Business School, 202

The intestinal mast cell in normal and parasitised rats

Parasitic infections in man and animals continue to be the cause of severe social and economic problems on several continents; even in countries where highly efficient methods of agriculture have been developed, parasitism remains a source of grant financial loss to the farming community. Measures to combat infection include treatment with anthelminthics, improvement of hygiene, elimination of vectors and intermediate hosts as well as efficient husbandry. But these methods are often costly and not always practicable and in many instances a different approach is required. A major development in the prevention of parasitic infections was the introduction of vaccination techniques employing living irradicated larvae (Jarrett, Jennings, McIntyre, Mulligan and Urquhart, 1960; Urquhart, Jarrett and Mulligan 1962). But, as yet, many of the fundamental aspects of the immunity conferred by such techniques remain poorly understood. This has led to a renewed interest in the immune mechanisms involved in the expulsion of parasites from the host. It is essential to have an experimental system for exploratory studies which allows a detailed analysis of many of the factors involved. Large domestic animals are unsuitable because of the time and expense involved in quantitative experiments Nippostrongylus brasiliensis in the rat offers and excellent model system as it is easily quantitated, produces a good immunity and the life cycle is on a reasonable time scale. This thesis is a study of the role of the most cell and the mediators released by it in the immune response of the rate to this parasite

Advanced sensors technology survey

This project assesses the state-of-the-art in advanced or 'smart' sensors technology for NASA Life Sciences research applications with an emphasis on those sensors with potential applications on the space station freedom (SSF). The objectives are: (1) to conduct literature reviews on relevant advanced sensor technology; (2) to interview various scientists and engineers in industry, academia, and government who are knowledgeable on this topic; (3) to provide viewpoints and opinions regarding the potential applications of this technology on the SSF; and (4) to provide summary charts of relevant technologies and centers where these technologies are being developed

On the positive expected utility of combination wagers

We demonstrate that a utility maximizing individual with an everywhere concave utility function may optimally wager on two or more outcomes in an event even though the expected returns to a unit stake are negative on all outcomes except one

Reference to the index of miscellaneous items deposited with the University of Tasmania by various depositors at various times

Numerous letters, newspaper cuttings, photographs and programmes on many and varied topics, including a letter signed 'Robert Peel' (1827); obituary of John Walker, prominent miller and brewer of Barrack Street, Hobart (1874); letter addressed to the Chief Magistrate of George Town requesting constabulary to be on alert for bushrangers, Cash etc. (1843); and Royal visit to Tasmania (1974) - working programme, including University of Tasmania visit, of prince Charles

Adaptive Importance Sampling in General Mixture Classes

In this paper, we propose an adaptive algorithm that iteratively updates both the weights and component parameters of a mixture importance sampling density so as to optimise the importance sampling performances, as measured by an entropy criterion. The method is shown to be applicable to a wide class of importance sampling densities, which includes in particular mixtures of multivariate Student t distributions. The performances of the proposed scheme are studied on both artificial and real examples, highlighting in particular the benefit of a novel Rao-Blackwellisation device which can be easily incorporated in the updating scheme.Comment: Removed misleading comment in Section