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Seller Beware: Recovering the Value of Preferential Transfers of Goods or Equipment

By Norman N. Kinel and Timothy A. Solomon
November 27, 2007

Imagine you are an equipment manufacturer. You sell $45 million in goods to a reliable customer on credit, shipping them to a third-party warehouse to be held for the customer to pick up when needed. Months later, unable to pay and sliding toward bankruptcy, the customer returns the unused equipment. The next thing you know, the customer, having filed for bankruptcy, sues you to recover not only the $45 million value of the returned equipment, but also an additional $55 million in cash payments the customer had made.

That is exactly the situation Nortel Networks Inc. ('Nortel') recently faced in connection with the Chapter 11 cases of 360networks (USA) inc. and related entities ('360'), in which the Official Committee of Unsecured Creditors (the 'Committee') sought to avoid and recover aggregate transfers of over $101 million ' making the preference action one of the largest ever commenced against a single defendant.

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