COMI – the centre of main interests – is the test that decides which country's court can open the main insolvency proceedings against your debtor, and that single decision decides which law ranks your claim, who administers the estate and how much of an overdue invoice you can realistically recover.
COMI matters once your debtor is insolvent, or close to it, and operates across more than one country. If the debtor trades from a single office in a single country and has no foreign branches, holding structure or dispersed assets, the question rarely arises: the local insolvency court has jurisdiction and there is nothing to argue about. The analysis becomes necessary the moment a group company, a holding entity, or a debtor with recently relocated management is involved.
Under Regulation (EU) 2015/848, COMI is presumed to be the country of the debtor's registered office presumption, but that presumption can be displaced. Courts look at where administration actually happens: where creditors deal with the company, where management decisions are taken, where accounts are kept. A brass-plate address in one country and a real head office in another is exactly the situation COMI analysis exists to catch.
It does not apply to disputes that never reach insolvency. If your debtor is solvent but simply refusing to pay, this is a contract enforcement question, not a COMI question. Raising it too early wastes time better spent on a straightforward claim.
Three things drive cost here more than anything else. First, whether the presumption is disputed: an uncontested COMI location is a filing exercise; a contested one is litigation about jurisdiction before the underlying claim is even reached. Second, how many jurisdictions hold assets or branches – each additional country is a further set of local procedural rules and a further local representative to instruct. Third, whether the debtor has already moved its COMI shortly before insolvency, which routinely triggers its own dispute.
Where COMI turns out to sit in a jurisdiction with no direct recognition route for the creditor's home judgment, the practical alternative is often not to fight the COMI finding at all but to pursue local assets through a separate process – the reasoning behind enforcing a foreign judgment against assets abroad applies here just as it does outside insolvency. A parameter such as the time a court takes to rule on a jurisdiction challenge varies by court and by how contested the filing is; we confirm the realistic range for the specific jurisdiction before advising rather than quoting a fixed figure.
The role that actually resolves most of these questions in practice is the appointed insolvency practitioner, whose report on the debtor's real centre of operations often settles a dispute the parties would otherwise litigate for months.
At some stage you have to decide whether contesting or supporting a COMI finding is worth the cost against the size of your claim. If your exposure is modest relative to the estate and several creditors already agree on the jurisdiction, joining the main proceedings as filed is usually the sensible move – arguing COMI afresh rarely changes your recovery share enough to justify it.
If your claim is large, or if the debtor's COMI move looks designed to shift the estate into a jurisdiction with weaker creditor protection, contesting is different arithmetic. This is the point where understanding how the EU Insolvency Regulation recast changed the rules on COMI challenges actually pays for itself, because the recast gave creditors a narrower but clearer window to object before the main proceedings are recognised elsewhere.
Do not overlook the debtor's other exposures while deciding. If the same debtor has assets or a branch outside the COMI country, secondary insolvency proceedings explained may let you reach those local assets regardless of where the main proceedings sit – sometimes that route recovers more than fighting over COMI ever would.
Stop pursuing a COMI challenge, or drop the idea of one, in these situations.
No. Registration is a presumption, not the answer. Courts look past it when management, accounts and creditor dealings actually sit somewhere else, and the presumption is displaced accordingly.
A recent move invites scrutiny. Courts and other creditors will ask whether the move was genuine restructuring or an attempt to reach a more favourable insolvency regime, and that question is usually litigated before the main proceedings are settled.
Yes, within the window the applicable regulation allows. The challenge has to be evidenced with facts about where administration actually happens, not simply an assertion that another jurisdiction suits the creditor better.
The invoice does not disappear while a jurisdiction question gets argued, but the cost of arguing it in the wrong forum does not come back either. Picking the wrong route before the position is properly assessed is the expensive mistake here, not the insolvency itself.