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I came across this odd-phrased (to my ear at least) sentence in a text I'm proofreading, would appreciate your opinion:

"... the settlement agreement may be executed at any stage of the bankruptcy proceedings, provided that no sooner than the list of creditors is approved"

Is it OK? I would have used a ‘dummy’ subject or rephrased it completely.

QriS
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    Is that the end of the sentence? It would be grammatical if the actual subject and predicate of the subordinate clause followed, like so: “provided that no sooner than the list of creditors is approved X happens”. That would just mean, “provided that X happens no sooner than the list of creditors is approved”. If there is nothing more in the sentence, it is ungrammatical, and provided that is unnecessarily unwieldy. You could simplify it to “… at any stage of the bankruptcy proceedings, but not before the list of creditors is approved”. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Feb 01 '17 at 09:57
  • That is the end of the sentence :) It's a formal legal text, hence the wordiness))) Thank you! – QriS Feb 01 '17 at 10:04
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    If it is a legal document, you could go with, “… at any stage of the bankruptcy proceedings subsequent to the approval of the list of creditors”. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Feb 01 '17 at 10:59

1 Answers1

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It is not grammatical as is, and I suspect that either some words got left out or someone attempted to modify it from one phrase to another, but accidentally left in part of the original. A possible correction might be "... provided that this occurs no sooner than ...".

Especially Lime
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  • That's what I figured, thank you! It's just that the text has already been proofread by a native speaker (which I'm not), this is why I wanted to be sure before pointing out a grammatical mistake :) Thanks again! – QriS Feb 01 '17 at 09:44