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Bankruptcy in Thailand: Governing Law, Legal Procedure, and Courts

Transcript of the above video:

In this video today as the title suggests, we're going to be discussing bankruptcy in Thailand. I am not going to go into great depths as I explained I am not a Thai attorney,  I am an American attorney and I am the Managing Director here at the firm but this is just sort of a superficial overview of bankruptcy and bankruptcy jurisprudence here in the Kingdom just for those who sort of want of an overall understanding or maybe I should say a basic understanding of how bankruptcy works here in the Kingdom.

So Thailand basically since 1999 has had a separate Bankruptcy Court in much the same way for example in the United States there is the Federal Bankruptcy Courts which operate separate and apart from the regular more routine Courts or General Jurisdiction Courts. They deal only with bankruptcy. However there are certain ways in which their jurisdictions can kind of overlap in more general areas so if during the course of bankruptcy adjudication some civil matters may arise, the Bankruptcy court will take jurisdiction generally speaking over those. Also in a criminal context, there are certain ways in which criminal cases can fall under the purview of the Bankruptcy Court's.

The governing law for bankruptcy law in the Kingdom of Thailand emanates from the Bankruptcy Cases Act. All of this law was created in the late 90s basically as a response to the 1997 financial crisis and sort of the problems associated therewith but the Bankruptcy Cases Act created the specific courts and basically delineated those courts’ jurisdiction. Although that being said, I believe it wasn't until a little bit later that criminal jurisdiction was brought under the purview of bankruptcy courts under certain circumstances I think due to an amendment of the underlying law.

I look at it as it's kind of delineated into two types of bankruptcy courts. There is the central Bankruptcy Court which basically is the Bangkok metropolitan area. However cases Nationwide in Thailand could be filed in this court and they are also Regional bankruptcy courts which were allowed to be established pursuant to the bankruptcy cases act; they could be established outside of Bangkok. but that being said, Bangkok still, for lack of a better term, retains jurisdiction for bankruptcy cases Nationwide basically because I think that was the initial Court that was formed.

So we are not going to go much deeper in this video. We are going to do some more videos on this topic as time progresses in a more detailed manner and sort of drill down into the specifics of bankruptcy but basically Thai bankruptcy law it's not that old, in the specific context of its own Courts it is not that old jurisprudence. There was bankruptcy jurisprudence which predates the 90s and this Act which was adjudicated by courts of General jurisdiction but following the 1990s these bankruptcy courts were created and as a result we are looking at, those are the courts we are dealing with as of the time of this  video and they're going to go ahead and make adjudications and determinations with respect to how to apply bankruptcy law in cases involving corporations that are needing bankruptcy protection or re-organization.