Mt. Gox filed a motion requesting the U.S. Bankruptcy Court’s approval of the form of the official notification of the May 6 recognition hearing as well as approving the service via email. The motion also seeks to establish a deadline of seven days before that hearing for any party to object to the request for recognition of the Japanese insolvency case. Additional notice would be provided by posting an approved form of notification on the Mt. Gox web site as well as at the Reddit.com site.
That is not unusual. What is somewhat unusual is that the proposed notice does provide for email notice to known creditors of Mt. Gox, even those in the United States. Thus, some creditors in the United States may not receive notification of Mt. Gox’s recognition hearing date.
As a general rule, notices in U.S. bankruptcy cases are provided by regular (“snail”) mail rather than electronically. That would likely be both impractical and cost-prohibitive for Mt. Gox since each customer provided Mt. Gox with an email address and it is likely that very few customers provided a mailing address as well. On December 19, 2013, its Facebook page announced that, “MtGox has now achieved a milestone of over one million customers and growing.” (https://www.facebook.com/MtGox). Making one million copies, stuffing them in envelopes and timely mailing them to Mt. Gox’s customers would be daunting and costly.
It remains to be seen whether the United States Trustee requests that non-customers with known email addresses be noticed. Separate from that issue, it is likely that the U.S. Bankruptcy Judge will approve providing email notification of the Chapter 15 case to the customers and setting the requested April 29, 2014 deadline for filing written objections to the request for recognition.