Insolvency law

The eighteenth entry is a percentagem de rateio, and the English word waiting for it is one the reader already owns from a much happier setting. A « dividend » is what a company in good health hands to its shareholders out of its profits. In an insolvency it is also, and without the least irony, the name of what reaches creditors out of an estate that could not pay anybody in full. The liquidator « declares a dividend », creditors « receive a dividend », and the figure is quoted « in the pound », so that a claim of a thousand pounds met at fifteen pence in the pound has drawn a dividend of a hundred and fifty. Nothing in the word says which of the two scenes it belongs to. The split is not a slip but the plain sense holding firm: a dividend is a sum divided among those entitled to it, and whether there was much left to divide is a separate question the word declines to answer. So a percentagem de rateio is the dividend, or the rate of dividend, and « the distribution percentage » — which is what the phrase invites — is not what a notice to creditors will say.