The fight over defunct Nortel Networks' $7.5 billion in cash will be decided in joint U.S.-Canadian court hearings and not in arbitration, a U.S. appeals court ruled on Friday, Reuters reported on Saturday. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit upheld a bankruptcy court ruling in March that there was never an agreement to use arbitration to divide the pile of cash among various Nortel estates around the world. Nortel sought protection from creditors in courts around the world in 2009 and its businesses were quickly sold, reducing a once-global corporate giant to little more than a pile of cash. But it was never decided how to allocate the money raised between different insolvency and bankruptcy proceedings in different countries. An agreement governing the money refers to undefined "dispute resolvers" that Nortel's European estates argued was arbitration. The U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Del. disagreed, and the Court of Appeals affirmed that ruling.
