Eloi Colldeforns, wins the Uría Menéndez Legal Research Award
Xavier Codina García-Andrade, Alexandre Mota Pinto and Luís Bertolo Rosa received honourable mentions
June 20, 2023 
Eloi Colldeforns, counsel (corporate law) based in the Barcelona office, has won the first edition of the Uría Menéndez Legal Research Award and the winning prize money of EUR 5,000. The purpose of this award is to support and encourage Uría Menéndez’s lawyers and professionals to carry out innovative and high-quality legal research. The jury also awarded honourable mentions to Xavier Codina García-Andrade Alexandre Mota Pinto and Luís Bertolo Rosa.
Eloi Colldeforns won the award for his entry entitled “La financiación (interina o nueva) en el contexto de una reestructuración: un único y delicado puente hacia un doble incentivo”, an article about the six main measures introduced by Spanish Law 16/2022, which amended the consolidated text of the Insolvency Law, regarding the two incentives to encourage financing for debtors in debt restructurings. These incentives consist of protecting interim and new financing against avoidance actions (clawback) and improving the insolvency ranking of the claims originating from the financing. [Read the article in Spanish]
Xavier Codina García-Andrade, senior associate (public law) based in the Madrid office, was a finalist for his entry “El reglamento de bloqueo: un antídoto que mata”, in which he analyses the so-called Spanish Blocking Regulation that the EU approved in 1996, and which will be amended in the not-too-distant future. The Regulation imposes an obligation on European authorities and operators to ignore US extraterritorial sanctions (identified as such by the EU). For example, a European operator would find it difficult to terminate a contract on the grounds of the counterparty being included in one of those US sanctions programmes, since it would be recognising an extraterritorial measure, which the Regulation prohibits. [Read the article in Spanish]
Alexandre Mota Pinto and Luís Bertolo Rosa, partner and senior associate (litigation/dispute resolution), respectively, based in the Lisbon office, were also finalists for their entry entitled “Créditos de suprimentos e recuperação empresarial”, which analyses whether loans held by new shareholders of a company that is in financial difficulty and who make such contributions to restructure the company’s liabilities and recover the business should be classed as subordinated shareholder loans. The article reaches the conclusion that they should not be classed this way given the different (and sometimes conflicting) interests in this type of situation and the most appropriate way of reconciling them. [Read the article in Portuguese]
The members of the jury were José Massaguer Fuentes (chair), Emilio Díaz Ruiz, Jaime Folguera Crespo and Eduardo Trigo y Sierra.