A U.S. appeals court dismissed a closely watched creditor lawsuit yesterday that stemmed from the 2008 bankruptcy of Tribune Co., a day after it took the unusual step of withdrawing a nearly identical opinion because it had been published in error, Reuters reported yesterday. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit had ruled on Thursday that Tribune creditors could not claw back $8 billion paid to public shareholders nearly a decade ago in a buyout that was blamed for its bankruptcy. On Monday, the court issued a two-sentence order saying the opinion was published by mistake, and took the rare step of clawing back its clawback ruling. Yesterday’s opinion came to the same conclusion as the withdrawn ruling, and ran the same 53 pages. A side-by-side comparison revealed about five tweaks, such as replacing "transferred to" with "assumed by" in describing the arcane procedures for determining ownership of certain legal claims. The opinion also changed a "with" to a "without" in a comment attributed to a former securities regulator.
