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Members of Oklahoma’s billionaire Schusterman family have beaten back a lawsuit alleging that their $7.2 billion sale of Samson Resources to a KKR-led private equity consortium unfairly enriched them to the detriment of the oil-and-gas company’s creditors in bankruptcy, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. A trustee pursuing recoveries for creditors in Samson’s bankruptcy had sued the former owners in 2017, saying the buyers paid twice the company’s fair market value in a 2011 deal. The trustee had alleged that the deal burdened Samson with more debt than it could handle, leading to its bankruptcy in 2015. In a ruling Wednesday, Judge Brendan Shannon in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Del., said the trustee failed to make its case that the subsequent owners overpaid. “The gold standard for determining the value of an asset is to sell it in an open and fair market,” the judge said. “A thing is worth what a willing buyer will pay to a willing seller following a proper marketing process” at arms’ length, with both having reasonable knowledge of relevant facts. Opinions of valuation experts, such as the one that the Samson trustee used, are less reliable than negotiations in determining the fair market value of an asset, he said. Samson took on more than $3 billion in debt as part of the buyout and struggled afterward as oil and gas prices fell.

Overstock.com will buy certain assets of bankrupt home goods retailer Bed Bath & Beyond for $21.5 million, the online retailer said on Tuesday, Reuters reported. The deal, designated a stalking-horse bid under the U.S. Bankruptcy Code, will include intellectual property, business data and rights to mobile applications, and will also assume certain liabilities of Bed Bath & Beyond. Bed Bath will continue to solicit other bids until the expected deadline on Friday and will undertake an auction next week to determine the winning bidder if additional bids are received, the company said. The retailer had delivered 10% of the purchase price in cash to an escrow agent in immediately available funds, Overstock said in a regulatory filing. Bed Bath & Beyond filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in April after struggling with dwindling sales and a failed merchandising strategy.

Instant Brands Inc., the maker of Instant Pot and Pyrex kitchenware, will solicit offers to sell the business in bankruptcy while considering alternative transactions to restructure more than $500 million in debt on its balance sheet, a company lawyer said yesterday, Bloomberg News reported. Instant Brands lawyer Brian Resnick said during a virtual court hearing that company advisers will explore both options as the company tries to figure out how to get out of chapter 11. The company, which is owned by private-equity firm Cornell Capital, could use chapter 11 to restructure its balance sheet if it can find an investor to fund a chapter 11 plan; a buyer could purchase Instant Brands’ assets or lenders could take over the business in exchange for debt relief, Resnick said. “All those options are on the table,” he said. Instant Brands wants parties to submit indications of interest by July 27 and is targeting an Aug. 23 bid deadline, according to a slide show company lawyers played during Tuesday’s hearing. In the meantime, Instant Brands will continue operating its business as normal, Resnick said. The company already cleared an initial hurdle in its chapter 11: It won court approval for a roughly $133 million chapter 11 financing to fund the business and keep its factories running during bankruptcy. The structure is “somewhat unusual,” Instant Brands lawyer David Schiff said, necessitated by a complex debt deal the business used to raise new money early this year.

Health care startup Thirty Madison, the company behind men’s hair loss medication ‘Keeps’ and other treatments, has acquired patient records of bankrupt birth control provider The Pill Club, Bloomberg News reported. The acquisition announced Tuesday includes medical records, patient lists, prescription files and other customer and insurance information, according to documents filed in Texas bankruptcy court. Thirty Madison said the deal ensures continued care for more than 100,000 patients “who would otherwise be without options” and that The Pill Club’s patients will transition to receiving care through the acquirer’s women’s telehealth unit, Nurx. A majority of patients’ medical records and prescriptions have already been securely transferred to Nurx and its affiliated pharmacies, the company said on its site. The Pill Club, which was backed by an affiliate of venture financing firm TriplePoint Capital LLC, filed bankruptcy in April after California authorities accused the startup of fraudulently billing the state’s Medicaid program for contraceptives customers didn’t order and counseling sessions it never provided. The startup paid $18.275 million to settle state regulators’ claims without admitting wrongdoing.

Bed Bath & Beyond is in talks to keep its Buybuy Baby chain open through a possible sale to the private-equity owner of children’s apparel retailer Janie and Jack, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Go Global Retail, the owner of Janie and Jack, is bidding to acquire Buybuy Baby from its bankrupt parent company and planning to keep the baby-focused chain of stores operating. While Bed Bath & Beyond and Buybuy Baby have both been shrinking, the baby business has held up better than the larger home-goods chain, which filed for bankruptcy in April to close stores and look for last-ditch buyers. The company has been conducting going-out of-business sales at hundreds of Bed Bath & Beyond and Buybuy Baby locations in recent weeks. Bed Bath & Beyond is also shopping its assets in bankruptcy and last week pushed back the deadline for final bids to Thursday, court filings show. The company also is fielding interest from Overstock.com, the online discount retailer, for the intellectual property behind the main Bed Bath & Beyond banner.

Bed Bath & Beyond is expected to be dissolved after the failed retailer declared bankruptcy, but the company’s crown jewel — Buy Buy Baby — may live to see another day, CNBC.com reported. The baby gear retailer is drawing interest from at least two bidders as its parent company, Bed Bath & Beyond, works to auction off its assets and keep some form of its business alive, CNBC has learned. The interested parties include an unknown bidder, who would purchase the banner as a going concern and keep about 75% of stores open, according to correspondence obtained by CNBC. The other interested bidder is Babylist, a direct-to-consumer baby registry website that wants to buy its trademark and domain, that company’s CEO, Natalie Gordon, confirmed to CNBC. So far, it doesn’t appear as if there’s any interest in buying the Bed Bath banner and keeping its stores open, but some bidders are interested in buying its digital assets, a person familiar with the matter told CNBC.

SVB Securities management is in talks to buy back the investment bank from bankrupt SVB Financial Group, Bloomberg News reported. SVB Securities Chief Executive Officer Jeff Leerink and his team are preparing to announce a deal for the firm in the coming days, pending approval from the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York, said the people, who asked to not be identified because the matter isn’t public. No final decision has been made and talks could still fall apart. SVB Securities spent heavily in recent years hiring talent across Wall Street to build a competitive investment banking franchise, which was particularly strong in the health-care and technology sectors. The firm advised on about $9 billion in mergers and acquisitions last year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Bloomberg News first reported in March that the management of SVB Securities was exploring buying back the firm after Silicon Valley Bank was seized by regulators. SVB Financial, the former parent of Silicon Valley Bank, filed for bankruptcy in March, though SVB Securities and venture capital arm SVB Capital weren’t included in the filing.

A group of private investment firms, some with longstanding ties to the oil and gas industry, bought a Denver natural gas producer for $1.84 billion in a deal struck on Wednesday, the Denver Business Journal reported. Denver-based PureWest Energy LLC, the largest natural gas producer in Wyoming, will keep its local headquarters and its executive team in place but is now owned by a consortium of family offices and private equity funds. CEO Chris Valdez said that the new ownership will fortify the company, which has grown in downtown Denver since it formed out of the bankruptcy of a predecessor natural gas business and acquired some neighboring Wyoming gas operations. PureWest used to be known as Ultra Petroleum and UP Energy, a publicly traded company that moved to Denver from Texas in 2018. It reorganized and shed $2 billion in debt through chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2020 during the oil and gas crash set off by the pandemic, and it emerged owned by its lenders operating under new management and adopting the PureWest Energy name. The group of buyers that acquired PureWest calls itself the PW Consortium.