AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. won court approval of a stock conversion plan that had spurred a shareholder lawsuit and cast a cloud over the movie theater chain’s efforts to secure new financing, Bloomberg News reported. The settlement, approved on Friday, includes extra shares for individual investors, thousands of whom had opposed it, citing the dilution of their shares among other concerns. Many of them fueled the pandemic-era “meme stock” rally that saved AMC from a bankruptcy filing. The ruling by Delaware Chancery Court Judge Morgan Zurn caps a protracted and bitter legal fight over AMC’s preferred equity units, or APEs, which pitted the company’s top executives against part of that retail investor base. Last month Zurn surprised the market by rejecting an earlier version of the settlement, sending the value of AMC’s regular shares soaring and the APEs plunging. She found that the original deal waived too many potential claims against the company.
