For those of you that have not already found out the hard
way, another one of our bright ideas has been brought crashing down to earth by
circumstances beyond our control. For
some time now we had been advocating sending notice of general meetings to pass
a winding up resolution to Nicesheriffs.
The logic behind this is that under section 183 execution or attachment
cannot be completed after receipt of that notice and Nicesheriffs was a good
way of bringing such a notice to the High Court Enforcement Officers (HCEOs).
The HCEOs used to access the Nicesheriffs system to check on a file of
individual insolvency information provided by the Insolvency Service and notice
information extracted from the Gazette. This was not their only source of
information, but it was a useful central point for you to send notices to,
rather than having to identify any possible court jurisdictions that might have
executions or attachments pending and send each one a separate notice.
Unfortunately, following an agreement in 2010 - 2011
between the HCEOs and the Ministry of Justice, the Nicesheriffs system has not
been used by HCEOs for over a year and is now redundant except for the minor
purpose of allocating a HCEO for the one or two writs where the applicant does
not already have an Officer involved. As
a result, there is no benefit in sending notices to Nicesheriffs anymore and
The Registry Trust will not action such notices if you do send them.
One possible solution would be to Gazette notice of the
members’ meeting, possibly by “tweaking” the wording of the current notices you
issue for S98 meetings. It might require
some agreement between the Insolvency Service and HCEOs to make such notice
work, but we don’t actually know if
stopping executions or attachments is as much of an issue as it has been in the
past.
We are in the process of updating our checklists but for now,
if you are using versions of our checklists that refer to giving notice to
Nicesheriffs, please take out that line to save the wasted effort.
