Court Opinion

ID: 9480452
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 07:48:20.279945+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:47:41.837997
License: Public Domain

CUDAHY, Circuit Judge,
concurring in part and dissenting in part:
The majority has taken its “horse” over the jumps here with the abandon of a true steeplechaser. Somehow it has managed to slip by what seems to me the real stone wall on the course. The Bank is, of course, located in Illinois, and the deposit contract was made explicitly subject to Illinois and federal law. There is absolutely no legal basis for the Bank to release funds at the request of a foreign receiver unless and until a petition has been filed under 11 U.S.C. section 304 to authorize ancillary proceedings in Illinois. At that point, a judge in Illinois may direct the surrender of the funds. That this might have cost the estate something is certainly not a good reason for waiving the requirement. To allow banks willy-nilly to ship their depositors’ funds on demand to foreign receivers in the hope that the requests will subsequently prove legitimate seems to me very bad policy indeed.
The majority attempts to gallop around the fundamental barrier here by confidently asserting that, had the receiver made an application to the district court pursuant to section 304, the Hong Kong receiver’s credentials would certainly have been accepted despite the service defect. Alternatively, as the majority notes, Ma may lack standing to sue because of the settlement with the judgment creditors. There may be substantial merit to these points, but they do not seem to me to legimate retroactively the unauthorized release of the funds by the Bank.
I therefore respectfully dissent to the extent indicated.