PPSR & COVID-19

There is no shortage of articles being published concerning the impacts of the current Coronavirus pandemic but the following extract concerning PPSR registration from the law firm of Cooper Grace Ward serves as a timely reminder:

Are your security interests registered?

There is a heightened risk of insolvency occurring in respect of all businesses over the next six months. If you are lending money, trading on retention-of-title terms, leasing goods or taking security over personal property in any way, it has never been more important to ensure that you have correctly registered security interests on the Personal Property Securities Register.

There may be a small window to act. The Corporations Act provides that a security interest that is registered in respect of a corporation more than 20 days after the security interest is perfected will vest in the company on winding up or administration. Even less time may apply for certain security interests. An out-of-time security interest that is registered today will only be enforceable if the grantor-company survives the next six months.

We recommend that you act quickly to register any unregistered security interests.

You can still enforce security interests and guarantees

Notwithstanding the Federal Government’s amendments to insolvency laws, parties can still enforce security interests and personal guarantees.

Personal guarantees may be more difficult to enforce due to the effect that the pandemic is having on the courts around the country – though, theoretically, nothing is stopping the enforcement of a guarantee. Security interests under the Personal Property Securities Act 2009 (Cth) (PPSA), on the other hand, do not require a judgement before a secured party can take enforcement action. The PPSA provides secured parties with powers of seizure and disposal. Of course there would be significant reputation risk around enforcement of securities under the current environment that would need to be carefully considered.

The full article can be found here.

How to Renew a PPSR Registration

As seen in my last post, we're rapidly approaching the time where many suppliers will be needing to renew registrations they put in place shortly after the start of the PPSR in 2012.

Renewal should be a straightforward process. 

Individual PPSR Brokers will probably have different approaches to the activity but the following shows the step by step process involved in renewing your registrations directly on the PPSR website.

In order to attempt this, you will need to have already established an account with the PPSR – this is a requirement for setting up an SPG but might have been avoided if the supplier’s SPG was set up for them by an intermediary that already had a PPSR account.

The following steps show the process once you have navigated to the PPSR and logged into your account.

Access your Secured Party Group (SPG) and click on the Group Registrations tab:

Use the 'Other filter options' to select a suitable range of expiry dates:

This will generate a screen showing all registrations due to expire within the selected time frame.

Select the registration you want to renew and click on the renew button:

Unfortunately, for reasons that are not entirely clear, if you make multiple selections, ie, you have a number of registrations that need to be renewed, the ‘Renew’ button becomes greyed out and unavailable!  In other words, registrations can only be renewed one-by-one, so it could be a bit of a slog if you have a lot of registrations expiring at the same time.

Once the Renew button is clicked you’ll be asked to choose a new expiry date and be given the opportunity to review the details of the registration being renewed:

It’s a little annoying that while the PPSR allows for simple selections for 25 year and indefinite registrations, it doesn’t allow for a simple 7-year registration – instead, the PPSR requires the user to manually enter a 7-year expiry.

You should also note that, when setting the expiry date for, say, 7 years, the 7 year period counts from the current day’s date and NOT the original expiry date. 

After that, it’s a simple matter of confirming the renewal and paying the renewal fee (which will be exactly the same as if a new registration were being lodged):

While it should only take a minute to renew a registration, make sure you don’t cut things too fine and miss the expiry date.  Registrations that have already expired cannot be renewed!

Obviously, a third party PPSR Services provider should be able to provide bulk renewal facilities along with an alert process warning of impending expiries and their own renewal processes are likely to work quite differently.

UPDATE: AFSA has now told me that, following my whinge suggestion that a simple 7-year expiry selection should be available for renewals, they have implemented that change.  Renewals will now be a little bit easier... which is nice.

Spike in PPSR Registrations due to Expire

Earlier this week, AFSA released their PPSR statistics for the 2018 June quarter.

While there’s not much that’s particularly surprising in the statistics (which you can find here) there is a new addition to the format, in that AFSA has now provided information regarding the number of registrations due to expire in the next 18 months.

I’ve drawn up a quick chart based on the figures, in as much as they relate to ‘Other Goods’ registrations (the type of registration most appropriate to the majority of trade credit suppliers):

While the picture from March 2019 onwards looks as we might have expected, this is preceded by a huge spike in expiries in January 2019, surrounded by high levels of expiring registrations from October to February.

While the last two days of January 2012 saw the start of the Register (and the previous three months a few waves of advanced registrations and migrations from other registers) I’m surprised that the registration activity that took place at those times didn’t concern itself, almost exclusively, with transitional registrations with an indefinite expiry.  As someone very closely involved with thousands of bulk registrations in those early weeks of the register, virtually all were lodged as indefinite transitional registrations.

However, clearly there were a great many registrations being lodged for only 7 years and these are now coming up for renewal.

I'll shortly be following up this post with a step by step guide to renewing registrations on the PPSR.

When does the Grantor take possession?

I recently had cause to read a helpful summary of a decision by the South Australian Supreme Court in the matter of Allied Distribution Finance Pty Ltd v Samwise Holdings Pty Ltd [2017] SASC 163.  While much of the background to the case is a little fiddly, I’ll give a short ‘broad strokes’ summary in order to help demonstrate why this might be a very useful decision for the hire industry.

For those wanting a more detailed look, I recommend the summary HERE  or, for those that want a real thrill, the full text of the judgment can be found HERE.

The case concerned Bill’s Motorcycles – a dealer, selling and servicing Kawasaki motorcycles.  Bill’s had been financing its floor stock with one financier but then struck an agreement with another (Allied Distribution Finance – ADF).  Bill’s stock of 40 motorcycles (secured by the original financier) was bought out by Kawasaki and, effectively, sold to ADF.  Bill’s maintained possession of the motorcycles and ADF lodged a PMSI registration on the PPSR to perfect its security interest over them.

When Bill’s went into administration a couple of months later, there was a dispute concerning those 40 motorcycles between Samwise, the holder of a General Security Interest (AllPAAP) over all Bill’s assets and ADF as a PMSI holder.

While a PMSI will usually take priority over an AllPAAP, in this case, Samwise argued that because Bill’s was already in possession of the motorcycles at the time ADF lodged their PMSI registration,  ADF had failed to meet the time-scale requirements of section 62 of the PPSA.

Section 62, effectively, states that, in order to achieve PMSI priority over inventory items, a registration must be lodged before the grantor obtains possession of the property.

Samwise argued that, as Bill’s had already been in possession of the motorcycles for some time before ADF lodged their registration, ADF was not entitled to PMSI priority.

In his judgment, Justice Blue determined that, in the overall context, the implication of section 62 should be taken to mean that the registration must be lodged before the grantor obtains the type of possession that would entitle them to grant a PMSI interest in the property.

Thus it is the grantor’s possession in the role of PMSI grantor that matters, rather than their mere physical possession of the property.

While this is unlikely to be of any assistance to trade credit suppliers forgetting to perfect their Retention of Title rights in time, it may have implications for the long-term hire industry.

Last year, the Government made changes to the manner in which hires and leases were caught up by the PPSA.  In short, the changes involved leases for less than 2 years no longer needing to be registered on the PPSR.  Where a lease was established for an indefinite period that may or may not extend beyond 2 years, the new legislation only required a registration to be put in place once that 2-year limit was breached.

When I posted about the new legislation, I wrote:

In order to be eligible for PMSI super priority where the collateral being used is designated as a non-inventory item, the perfecting registration must be lodged within 15 business days of the lessee taking possession of the property.

 However, where an indefinite lease is concerned and the lessor doesn’t lodge their registration until it becomes clear the lease may extend beyond the new 2 year qualifying period, that 15 business days period may long since have passed leaving the lessor’s claim to their equipment to fall behind those of other general security holders with registrations already in place.

Justice Blue’s decision in the Bill’s Motorcycles case suggests that, while a lessee may have been in physical possession of property for 729 days, it will only be at the 2 year mark they have possession in the capacity of a grantor of a PMSI right and it should, therefore, be at that 2 year point when the PPSA’s 15 business days countdown for a PMSI eligible registration should commence.

Whether this interpretation is sufficient to also satisfy the Corporations Act’s dreaded section 588FL is another matter! 

Perfection by Possession or Control

For ease of communication and in service of providing the degree of emphasis required, it’s quite common for me to say that

“If you don’t register your security interest on the PPSR, you might as well not have one”.

However, it’s easy to forget that there are other means by which a security interest might be perfected.  In addition to Perfection by Registration, there is also Perfection by Control and Perfection by Possession.

Perfection by Control is the sort of thing usually only available to Banks, where they are able to treat a Grantor’s bank account with them as collateral under a security agreement – although the Grantor may own the contents of that account, the Bank will have day to day control. 

Another variation might possibly involve a Grantor’s Stockbroker who is able to exercise controlling rights over their client’s portfolio.  If the client had granted their stockbroker a security interest over their securities account, then, by virtue of their day to day control of those securities, the stockbroker would not need to register that security interest in order for it to be effective.

It is also been adjudged possible for those exercising control over satellites or other space objects from a ground station to be able to use that control to perfect a relevant security interest.

While this form of perfection is not likely to be available to a trade credit supplier, they would nevertheless do well to note that Perfection by Control trumps any other form of perfection.

Thus, if you supply a space satellite subject to a Retention of Title clause, your PMSI super-priority, perfected by registration, will be outranked by any general security interest that might be held over that satellite by whichever third party happens to be flicking the switches and pressing the buttons controlling that satellite.

Satellites aside, Perfection by Control primarily applies to intangible forms of collateral – ones where it is not possible to perfect over them by possession and the ability to exercise control is used as the functional equivalent of possession.

The issue of Perfection by Possession is fairly topical given a recent court judgement in the case of Knauf Plasterboard versus the liquidators of Plasterboard West P/L trading as Retroflex.

Retroflex had granted Knauf a general security interest in all their present and future property via a security deed.  Unfortunately, Knauf omitted to register that deed on the PPSR and it was only some 20 months later, when it became obvious that Retroflex may have been struggling, that Knauf finally got around to lodging their registration.  Barely a week then passed before Retroflex defaulted under the deed and Knauf appointed Receivers to protect their interests. This was followed a couple of days later by Retroflex appointing liquidators.

The liquidators took the view that because Knauf’s security deed had been lodged within 6 months of their appointment and not within 20 days of the security deed being entered into, section 588FL of the Corporations Act allowed the collateral subject to that deed to vest with Retroflex.

I’ve written previously on the subject of the dreaded section 588FL and its implications at PPSA vs The Corporations Act (which also includes a brightly coloured chart!).

While on the face of it the liquidators were correct, Knauf argued that in addition to the registration, they had also achieved perfection of their security interest by possession – such possession taking place with their appointment of the Receivers.

While there were other issues at play, not least the dubious process Retroflex used to appoint liquidators, the court determined that:

• Merely appointing receivers is not sufficient to constitute ‘possession’ if the property in question appears to remain in the possession of the grantor/debtor; and
  
• When the receivers took steps to exercise their rights under the security deed, their actions would be taken as equivalent to a seizure of the property.

Under section 21 of the PPSA, possession as a result of seizure (or repossession) is explicitly excluded as a form of possession sufficient to achieve perfection under the Act.

Set up a PPSR Alert

I put up a post last month detailing how to conduct a search on the PPSR – primarily aimed at helping businesses keep abreast of any registrations that might have been lodged against them. 

By way of a companion piece, I thought I’d now write about how you can get an automatic alert from the PPSR any time someone lodges a registration against you.  The alert won’t give you any details beyond letting you know that a new registration has been made but at least it will save you from having to make unnecessary searches on the off-chance a new registration might have been lodged.

Anyone can sign up for a PPSR alert and the service is entirely free of charge.

First go to https://transact.ppsr.gov.au/ppsr/Home

From there, use the menu tab to navigate from Subscriptions to Alert notifications to Create alert notification request as below:

Once there, you’ll be asked to enter (and then re-enter) the email address to which you want your alert to be sent:

If you have a Business to Government link set up (most of you won’t) you can also enter details here to have alerts sent to your B2G mailbox:

Otherwise you can just leave this blank.

You are then prompted to set up a name for your Alert as well as the length of time you want the Alert to remain active – the PPSR will present you with a default name and use the current date as a start date with the alert to run for a year -  this will be fine for most but can easily be amended.

Proceeding to the next page, you’ll then be asked to identify the Grantor on which you want the alert - this will be you if you're checking up on people lodging against you.  

There are a couple of things to note here, firstly, the alert system can only be set up for Grantors that have either an ACN, ARBN or ARSN – which means no alerts can be set up on sole traders, partnerships, trusts, Governmental entities or indeed any organisation without one of those three identifiers.  On the plus side, however, you can add multiple Grantors to the same alert.

Simply choose the relevant identifier (this will usually be the ACN), hit the Verify button to make sure you’ve not made a typo and then Add to place the Grantor on your list of Alert candidates.

Keep doing this until you get bored.

You have now set up your Alert and all that is needed for it to be activated is clicking on Next> at the bottom right of the screen.   

When I first went through this process I was expecting to go to a screen asking me to review all that I’d entered and confirm that I wanted to go ahead and activate the Alert but, although you are taken to a ‘Confirmation’ screen, the Alert has already been set up by this point.

The confirmation email to which the above screen refers arrives promptly and looks as follows:

Keep this email safe or, at least, keep the Alert Notification Request number handy as this acts in tandem with your email address to allow you access to maintain or delete the Alert notification you have set up - as you can see from the below screencap I took when cancelling the Alert notifications I’d set up on the OneSteel companies:

As I said at the outset, the alert the PPSR sends you won’t tell you very much but at least it will act as a prompt to conduct a fresh search if you don’t already have a good idea as to what the new registration might relate to.

Registering against Trusts

It’s been well over 4 years since I last dedicated a post here to the issue of trusts, so, while the earlier article still holds up well, it’s probably about time I revisited the subject and freshened up what we know.

Firstly, I’ll preface what follows with Recommendation 110 from the Official Review of the Personal Property Securities Act completed just over 2 years ago and, as far as I can tell, no closer to having the vast majority of its 394 recommendations adopted.

Recommendation 110: That the Regulations be amended so that a registration to perfect a security interest over trust assets should be made against the relevant details for the trustee, rather than the ABN or other identifying details for the trust.

Why did the Official Review make this recommendation?

Well, let’s look at what the rules for registration look like when a Trust is involved.

Unfortunately, those rules won’t be found in the Personal Property Securities Act itself, but in the Personal Property Securities Regulations 2010,  wherein you will be treated to some of the most convoluted ‘guidance’ I’ve come across in relation to the PPSA.

 

To save you the agony, I’ve summarised the key guidance:

• If the Trustee is a corporate body and has an ARSN (Australian Registered Scheme Number – pretty unlikely for trade credit transactions) then the registration should be lodged against the 9 digit ARSN.
• If the Trustee is any other kind of body (or individual) and the relevant Trust has an ABN, the registration should be lodged against the Trust’s ABN (this is probably the most likely scenario).
• If the Trustee is a corporate body but its Trust does not have an ABN (unlikely) then the registration should be lodged against the Trustee’s ACN.
• If the Trustee is an individual but the Trust does not have an ABN, then registrations should be against the individual’s details – usually, full name and date of birth.

The first problem that springs to mind lies with simply knowing whether the company that is interested in becoming your customer is acting as a Trustee or not.  Your potential customer may simply omit mentioning that they are acting on behalf of a Trust.  How is the poor supplier to know?

While the supplier may discover that there is a Trust, not knowing whether the potential customer is acting in their capacity as Trustee or purchasing in their own right will either leave the supplier open to opting for the wrong type of registration or going to the trouble and expense of lodging two registrations ‘just to be safe’.

Where does the supplier stand if goods are supplied to a company with a Trust that doesn’t have an ABN (and thus registered against the ACN of the company) only to find out later that an ABN has since been obtained for the Trust? 

Interestingly, the same rules that apply to identifying Grantors also apply to identifying Secured Parties when setting up their Secured Party Groups on the Register.  However, while failing to identify the Grantor in absolute accordance with the PPSA’s rules may lead to the registration being deemed ineffective, the situation is not as dire when it comes to identifying Secured Parties. 

As found in Future Revelation Ltd v Medica Radiology & Nuclear Medicine Pty Ltd[2013] NSWSC 1741, the determining factor will be whether the registration would be revealed during a properly conducted search – while it would not be found in the case of a wrongly identified Grantor, an incorrectly identified Secured Party’s registration would still show up in Grantor based search results.

In summary, where Trusts are involved, the PPSA’s registration rules are horrible, ill-conceived and confusing but… we’re stuck with them for the foreseeable future and, as far as companies are concerned, I advocate a belt & braces approach of lodging registrations against both the Trust ABN and the Trustee’s ACN.

Greater Clarification for Fixtures under the PPSA

No sooner has the first anniversary passed of the court's judgment in Forge Group Power Pty Limited (in liquidation (receivers and managers appointed) v General Electric International Inc & Ors (2016) than a judgment has been handed down on the first significant appeal against that decision.

I won't go into any great detail concerning the original judgment (particularly because I've already written on the subject here) but, suffice to say, it involved a lot of money ($50 million) and whether or not the leased property in question should be treated as a fixture.

The latest judgment in Power Rental Op Co Australia, LLC v Forge Group Power Pty Ltd (in liquidation) (receivers and managers appointed) [2017] saw the Court of Appeal being asked to reconsider whether the turbines in the original case really were the non-fixtures the court found them to be.

The appellants' argument was (largely) that the PPSA did not use common law concepts regarding fixtures but instead created its own definition (effectively, property affixed to land) and because the turbines in question were substantially 'bolted' to the ground, they had become fixtures and thus fell outside the auspices of the PPSA.

The argument, however, appeared to carry little weight with the Court of Appeal which, in dismissing the appellants' case, held that:

The definition of ‘fixtures’ in the PPSA was intended to import the common law notions of affixation that ‘a fixture is an item of tangible personal property that is annexed to real property in such as way as to become a part of the real property and that whether an item is a fixture “depends on the degree and purpose of annexation of the item as well as the rebuttable presumption that what is fixed to land is a fixture and that which is not remains a chattel”’ is the relevant test (not a bespoke test such as a fixture is a ‘non-trivial attachment’),

In short, merely being attached to land (or a building built on the land) doesn't necessarily render an item of property a fixture - it actually has to become part of the fabric of the real estate in question in order to be considered a fixture.

Although much will depend upon the purpose the property is intended to serve by being attached to a building this should still be something of an alert to suppliers who might otherwise have been too quick to assume the PPSA would not apply to goods they were supplying.

PPSR & ‘Complicated Scenarios’

During the late 12^th and early 13^th centuries, the then Pope was having some difficulties with what, he deemed to be, heretical Catholics – those whose beliefs were out of step with the orthodox Catholic teachings of the time.  This resulted in some pretty horrific acts, particularly in southern France, and none more so than the massacre at Beziers in July 1209.

The town of Beziers was seen as a stronghold of Catharism (the heretics) but also included a fair-sized population of orthodox Catholics.  When ordered to attack the town, the story goes that a young soldier asked the Pope’s representative, Arnaud Amalric, how he would be able to tell the difference between orthodox Catholics and the heretic Cathars.  The reply has been filtered down through history to us as ‘Kill them all and let God sort them out”.

I feel a little uncomfortable quoting Amalric in a context as mundane as the PPSR but I’ve found myself increasingly resorting to advice along the lines of:

‘When in doubt, lodge a registration’ or

‘It’s better to have a registration you don’t need than need a registration you don’t have’ and 

‘Register them all and let God sort them out’.

Personally, I don’t really like the ‘scatter gun’ approach, I prefer a little more surgical precision, but there comes a point where the issue is not just about being right but also about avoiding getting caught up in expensive, long, drawn out arguments where you need to demonstrate that you are right.

While the PPSR has been with us for well over 4 years now, there is still a surprising lack of legal precedent established and there are a number of areas where argument is commonplace. 

The extent to which a Transitional registration is still appropriate despite minor amendments to terms & conditions; when is it appropriate to register against a Trust and when against the trustee of that trust; and to what extent a PMSI registration can also perfect a non-PMSI element are just a few of the more contentious areas.

In a recent question that was put to me, a client is trading with a buying group where invoices will be paid by one entity and yet goods will be delivered to, and on-sold by, a number of separate, albeit, related entities.  Who should the registration be lodged against?

Without going into the specific terms, my advice was, effectively, two-fold:

1. You register against the entity, or entities, that have demonstrably accepted your retention of title clause; and
2. Register against them all – at least one of the registrations is bound to be right!

The second response isn’t one I’m particularly proud of, but suppliers regularly face complicated scenarios such as these and legal advice can be expensive.  A PPSR registration, on the other hand, will cost as little as $6.80.  

Not sure which of 10 companies to register against?  

Asking a law firm to check your agreements and advise, will result in an expenditure of anything up to $1000; by comparison, lodging a registration against each of the 10 companies, just to be on the safe side, will cost $68.

And, as I suggested earlier, just because you’ve had legal advice, probably very good legal advice, doesn’t mean you won’t still get an argument from a liquidator who believes they have received equally good legal advice.

Is there a downside to multiple registrations in such circumstances?

The PPSA allows for appeals to be made by Grantors that believe a registration is unreasonable but, for any penalties or claim for damages to be made against the registering supplier, it would need to be demonstrated that the supplier didn’t have a ‘reasonable belief’ that the registration would be appropriate.  Again, there are no legal precedents that help us very much here, but, the more complicated the scenario, the more difficult it would be to demonstrate that the supplier’s registrations were not a reasonable response to a complex situation.

So, while I don’t particularly want to align myself with a 13^th century, blood-thirsty religious fanatic, my advice may often be ‘Register them all and let God sort them out’.

Is that it? (Notice Filing System vs Transaction Filing System)

Once they get past the PPSR’s jargon of purchase money security interests, giving of notice identifiers, subordinated registrations etc, many of my trade credit clients have something of an ‘is that it?’ reaction. They’d been gearing themselves up to having to list part numbers and order references only to find that simply choosing the collateral class category of ‘Other Goods’ was pretty much all that was required. Understandably, there’s an element of anti-climax and concern that they should be doing more when it comes to describing the goods/collateral involved.

The answer to their concerns, to my way of thinking, rests very much in the nature of the register that the PPSR was set up to be. 

Prior to the PPSR, company security interests were registered on the ASIC Register of Company Charges.  The ASIC register acted as a Transaction filing system, whereby the document that acted as the security interest was filed in its entirety – a 30 to 40 page Registered Charge document signed by both parties being the most common.

Although the PPSR replaced ASIC’s register, the PPSR has been established as a Notice filing system whereby the secured party is merely required to announce that it has a security interest (or is likely to have a security interest).  The actual security interest – usually represented for trade credit suppliers by a Retention of Title clause in their terms and conditions – would need to be kept separately and brought out at any time evidence is required that the security interest asserted by the registration on the PPSR actually existed.

The registration on the PPSR, therefore, does not define the security interest or the collateral to which it applies, but instead merely needs to describe it in a manner that would provide an indication as to its nature for interested third parties.  Where the ASIC register stored 40 page documents, the PPSR stores the equivalent of an electronic post-it note.

Thus, when a supplier lodges a registration perfecting their Retention of Title security interest, they are putting others on notice that they have an interest, the precise details of which may be separately available from them in response to any third party enquiry – such as might be required from an insolvency practitioner should the customer fall over.

When a liquidator (or similar) is appointed to a company, they will conduct a search of the PPSR to see who is asserting they have a security interest.  They will then write to each of these asking for the evidence that such an interest exists and is consistent with the general description provided by their lodgement on the PPSR.  It is at this point that suppliers will need to detail the specific items of collateral to which their security interest applies and provide evidence of the relevant acceptance by the customer of their security rights.

Specific serial numbers are only required to be provided as part of a PPSR registration when that registration concerns motor vehicles, watercraft, aircraft and certain other weird and wonderful types of collateral such as Intellectual property patents and plant breeders’ rights.

Inserting serial numbers in Collateral description fields of ‘Other Goods’ registrations may be of some assistance to a liquidator in identifying specific stock – although promptly providing that information separately upon request would be just as helpful – but can create a rod for suppliers’ backs in as much as any typo or omission would render the effectiveness of that registration subject to challenge.  It would also take the supplier down the path of having to either lodge multiple registrations every time a fresh delivery was made or constantly amending existing registrations – an administrative burden I’m sure they could do without.

If a security interest is in the form of an accepted Retention of Title clause then an ‘Other Goods’ registration, describing the collateral as that supplied by the secured party and the interest as a Purchase Money Security Interest (PMSI) should be sufficient, if registered in a timely fashion, to secure a supplier’s rights to those goods until such time as they have been fully paid for and assure the supplier of a higher ranking interest over those goods than any other creditor in the event the customer falls insolvent.

Retention of Title Clauses - Where Less is More

At least once a week I’m asked to review a set of Terms & Conditions for ‘compliance’ with the PPSA.

I’ve always been a little amused by this idea given that much of the manner of the PPSA’s introduction was based on reflecting how creditors had, in practice, been securitising the payment obligations of their debtors rather than dictating how this should be done going forward.

Generally, in view of the nature of my client base, I’d need to do little more than check to make sure there was a half decent Retention of Title (ROT) clause present and, if they hadn’t already been added, suggest a few waivers of some of the obligations that the PPSA might otherwise require of creditors.

However, this morning I came across an ROT clause where PPSA compliance clearly was an issue.

The clause in question read as follows:

The Supplier and the Buyer agree that ownership of the Goods shall not pass until:

(a)   The Buyer has paid the Supplier all amounts owing to the Supplier; and

(b)   The Buyer has met all of its other obligations to the Supplier.

Aside from a touch of redundancy with (a) being pretty much covered off by (b), my main concern was over the wording at (a).

The PPSA gives suppliers the opportunity to take a Purchase Money Security Interest (PMSI) ‘super priority’ where their interest is over collateral that secures its own purchase price. The alternative to collateral securing its own purchase price would be for the identified collateral to be taken as security for a broader description of amounts owing – such a broader description would not necessarily qualify for the PPSA’s super priority treatment.

Unfortunately, the wording used at (a) above states that the Supplier is treating the goods they are selling as collateral against “all amounts” they may be owed and therefore offers up a ‘broader’ description of what is being secured than would arguably qualify for PMSI super priority.  I am acutely familiar with circumstances where insolvency practitioners have successfully argued this specific issue!

Given that there is remarkably little difference between (a) and (b), I suggested that (a) be rephrased along the following lines:

The Supplier and the Buyer agree that ownership of the Goods shall not pass until:

(a)   The Buyer has paid the Supplier the full purchase price for those Goods; and

(b)   The Buyer has met all of its other obligations to the Supplier.

While it might be a natural reaction on the part of suppliers to attempt to make their security interests as all-embracing as possible, when it comes to the PPSA and its PMSI super priority, it could be said that ‘less is more’.  Or, at least, that a narrower, more focused interest is likely to be more effective.

PPSR Registration Stats

Yesterday (20/10/14), AFSA released its quarterly statistics for the PPSR.

After the 'excitement' of the first quarter figures (which captured the race to register before the 2 year Transitional period expired), this quarter, and the previous quarter, show little of interest by way of registrations; although, it is slightly interesting to note the continued growth in searches of the Register.

Total number of registrations reached 8,305,528 by 30th September and the collateral classes covered show a clear domination by registrations of interests over Motor Vehicles:

Agriculture	66,818
Aircraft	12,639
All present and after acquired property	1,774,352
All present and after acquired property, except	220,432
Financial property	29,199
Intangible property	85,319
Motor vehicle	4,239,378
Other goods	1,834,231
Watercraft	43,160