Deep dives into market trends, technological shifts, and strategic analyses from our network of experts.
The Financial Sector Regulation Act of 2017 did not arrive as an isolated piece of legislation. It was the centrepiece of a deliberate reordering of how this country supervises its financial system — a recognition that prudential and conduct concerns required separate institutional homes, and that the post-crisis world demanded more than incremental reform.
Close-out netting is one of those mechanisms which, in ordinary times, operates almost invisibly. It is the machinery that gives the derivatives market its appetite for risk: the ability of a counterparty, upon the occurrence of a defined event, to terminate a portfolio of transactions and reduce them to a single net obligation in either direction.
The South African class action procedure, judicially developed rather than statutorily codified, has been used effectively in several public-interest contexts. It has not, despite occasional predictions, given rise to a meaningful tradition of securities class action litigation. The reasons for that gap are partly procedural and partly substantive, and they are worth examining.
South Africa adopted business rescue, in the form set out in Chapter 6 of the Companies Act, with stated reference to the international consensus around restructuring procedures. The local procedure has developed its own character in the years since, and one of the points at which that local character is most clearly visible is in its interaction with cross-border insolvency.
