The U.S. unit of Nortel Networks Corp., the defunct telecommunications company, asked a judge to schedule a November trial on whether to throw out $2.67 billion in claims filed on behalf of 38,000 U.K. retirees, Bloomberg News reported on Saturday. The request came after a mediator gave up on settlement talks last month, saying that bondholders, retirees and other creditors failed to agree on how to split $9 billion in cash. Nortel Networks Inc. asked the judge overseeing its slice of the multi-country bankruptcy to first decide whether the U.K. retirees have a legitimate claim to the money before deciding how best to divide it. Retiree representatives asked the judge to focus instead on how to split cash among Nortel’s units in the U.S., Europe and Canada.
