A U.S. judge and a Canadian judge agreed on Friday to a joint, simultaneous trial to decide how to divide $9 billion from the liquidation of Nortel Networks, overruling objections that the unusual arrangement would lead to "chaos," Reuters reported on Friday. Bankruptcy Judge Kevin Gross told the parties on a conference call held jointly with a Canadian judge that the litigants should prepare for a trial late this year. Administrators for former Nortel units in Europe had requested the judges send the matter to binding arbitration. Gross and Ontario Superior Court Justice Geoffrey Morawetz in Toronto have been overseeing the liquidation of the former telecoms giant, which once had a market value of $250 billion and global operations that employed 93,000. After Nortel filed in 2009 for protection from creditors in courts around the world, its units in the United States, Canada and Europe agreed to sell Nortel's operations as global businesses as a way to increase their value. However, those units in different countries never tackled the complex question of how to split the money that was raised.
