A rather unusual VID annual conference took place in hybrid form in 2020: the Advisory Board and the Board of Directors, observing the rules of social distancing, met on site while two-thirds of the members participated virtually on their computer monitors.
The professional quintessence of this VID annual conference’s content can be described succinctly in the statement that the future needs to return to the past. During both the panel discussion of prominent experts debating the question of “Who will pay for the crisis?” and in the virtual discussions of the 300 logged-in participants in front of their displays, the concluding opinion was that we need a return to the former insolvency administration regime if we want to reorganize and stabilize companies permanently even after the end of the coronavirus crisis. The participating bank representatives welcomed the raising of the hurdles for self-administration by lawmakers and considered the action to be a positive step — at the same time, the congress participants would like to see an end to the suspension of the obligation to file for insolvency in the near future.
Jutta Rüdlin, BRRS insolvency administrator and spokeswoman of the VID Advisory Board, summed up another conclusion reached at the autumn conference: “We need a ‘Protective Shield Light’ that can support small and midsize businesses that now find themselves in difficulties because of the coronavirus. The new restructuring procedure, the Act for the Stabilization and Restructuring of Companies (StaRUG), is a highly complex instrument that is unlikely to provide suitable and sufficiently rapid assistance for these cases.”
Additional information, impressions, and a film interview with Jutta Rüdlin:
https://www.vid.de/deutscher-insolvenzverwalterkongress-2020-2/
