Consol Energy Inc. was dealt another blow in its campaign against the bankruptcy plan of an Ohio-based rival, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported. A judge ruled on Monday that Consol doesn’t have standing to appeal the plan of bankrupt miner Murray Energy Inc. It was approved in May. Cecil, Pa.-based Consol, which sold five mines to Murray Energy in 2013, has been trying to scuttle the settlement that Murray reached with its creditors and the United Mine Workers of America union, claiming that it wasn’t fair to Consol, an unsecured creditor in the bankruptcy. On Monday, the bankruptcy judge wrote that Consol wasn’t aggrieved enough by the settlement to be able to appeal it, at least not in the legal sense. The conflict stems from that 2013 sale, a deal that transferred responsibility for paying retiree benefits due the miners who worked at those mines and their beneficiaries from the Pennsylvania company to the Ohio firm. Those benefits are protected by the Coal Act, which says that if an employer defaults on those responsibilities, the last company that owned them — if it is still in business — would be on the hook. Murray Energy, founded and led by firebrand Robert Murray, filed for chapter 11 protection in October 2019. The company said that given coal’s declining financial prospects and the weight of the company’s debts, it could only re-emerge as a functional entity if it shed much of its liabilities, including those under the Coal Act. In legal filings last year, Consol alleged that Murray Energy and the miners’ union colluded to dump those health care liabilities on Consol. And just after Murray’s bankruptcy plan, which rejected those obligations, was approved, the retiree’s benefit plan sued Consol and its previous parent, now called CNX Resources Inc., in federal court in Washington D.C., asking a judge to make the two Pittsburgh area companies pay.
