A recent case in the English High Court, Re Continental Assurance Company of London plc (Singer v. Beckett), constitutes the first judicial pronouncement on wrongful trading (s. 214 of the Insolvency Act) which concerns a major company. The case should render us cautious about the alleged superiority of wrongful trading over creditor protection regimes in other European jurisdictions, notably the German Insolvenzverschleppungshaftung, and the consequential idea of the European Commission to propose a new directive on wrongful trading.