ABSTRACT
The claim of third parties to be beneficially entitled to assets which appear to form part of the insolvent estate is the common theme of the material dealt with both by this chapter and the next. As has been seen, only those assets to which the insolvent has a beneficial entitlement are available to the creditors so each successful proprietary claim may reduce the amount available to those who merely have personal rights against the insolvent.1 In many cases, however, the battle will be between competing proprietary claims and it will be clear that those who have purely personal rights will not, in any event, derive any benefit from the disputed assets.2 This is particularly true of corporate insolvency, where in many cases the assets would anyway be caught by a floating charge and would be unavailable to the general creditors unless and until the debenture holder had been paid off. It has, for example, frequently been an administrative receiver rather than a liquidator disputing a claim to be entitled to assets on the basis of retention of title.
