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Metropolitan Brewing LLC filed for bankruptcy this month, citing, among other debts, $1 million in back rent owed to its landlord, the Chicago Business Journal reported. According to an Oct. 3 bankruptcy filing in U.S. District Court in the Northern District of Illinois, the Chicago Brewery owes back rent to Rockwell Properties LLC for its 33,000-square-foot site at 3057 N. Rockwell St. Founded in 2008, Metropolitan Brewing signed a 15-year lease for its current location in 2015. The million-dollar figure for back rent is in dispute, however, according to the Chicago Tribune, and will need to be forgiven in full or in part in order for the company to restructure. If Metropolitan Brewing is unable to rework its debt, the business may have to sell or liquidate, said owners Doug and Tracy Hurst. In addition to back rent, Metropolitan Brewing’s debts cited in the filing include $1 million to North Carolina-based Live Oak Banking Co. for an equipment loan and $386,000 to the Small Business Administration for an Economic Impact Disaster Loan. The brewery currently has eight full-time and 14 part-time employees, and last year grossed $2.16 million, according to the report.

The judge in Alex Jones’s bankruptcy case ruled on Thursday that he will not be allowed to use his chapter 11 filing to evade paying more than $1 billion in verdicts to families of the Sandy Hook shooting, the New York Times reported. The ruling by Judge Christopher Lopez in a Houston bankruptcy court means that Mr. Jones, the Infowars conspiracy broadcaster, will likely be working the rest of his life to pay his debt to the families. Last year, they were awarded historic damages in defamation lawsuits against him. It also closes off the possibility that Mr. Jones could liquidate Infowars and force the families to accept whatever proceeds result, leaving him free to start a new business. Earlier this year, the families asked that Judge Lopez order Mr. Jones to pay them the full damage awards, with no possibility of a trial or a forced settlement over a lesser amount — in legal terms, to make Mr. Jones’s debts to the families “non-dischargeable” through bankruptcy.

Cryptocurrency exchange FTX's former top lawyer testified yesterday that its founder Sam Bankman-Fried asked him to come up with "legal justifications" for why it was missing $7 billion in customer funds four days before the company declared bankruptcy, Reuters reported. Can Sun, FTX's former general counsel, testified at Bankman-Fried's fraud trial that the company on Nov. 7, 2022, asked investment fund Apollo for emergency capital to cover a wave of customer withdrawals. After Apollo requested FTX's financial statements, Sun testified, either Bankman-Fried or another executive sent him a spreadsheet indicating the cryptocurrency exchange was billions of dollars short of being able to satisfy customer withdrawals and that it also was owed billions of dollars by Bankman-Fried's crypto-focused hedge fund Alameda Research. "I was shocked," said Sun, who testified under a non-prosecution agreement in the third week of the trial in Manhattan federal court. Sun told jurors that after FTX shared the spreadsheet with Apollo, Bankman-Fried pulled him aside at the Bahamas luxury apartment complex where the 31-year-old former billionaire lived and told him Apollo had asked for a legal justification for the missing funds.

The Boy Scouts of America has received a U.S. bankruptcy judge's approval to pay about $245 million in fees to lawyers and financial advisers who crafted the youth organization's $2.46 billion settlement of sex abuse claims, Reuters reported. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Laurie Selber Silverstein in Wilmington, Del., late on Tuesday mostly approved final fee applications from more than two dozen law firms and advisers who worked on the bankruptcy case. The overall bankruptcy fees could end up closer to $275 million, based on outstanding requests for payment from other groups that participated in the bankruptcy. Judge Silverstein had decried the "staggering" legal fees racked up in the case in 2021, when the number crossed the $100 million threshold. White & Case, which served as lead counsel during the Boy Scouts' bankruptcy, received the highest fee award, at $71 million. Pachulski Stang Ziehl & Jones, which represented the official committee of abuse claimants, received $37.8 million, and Alvarez & Marsal, the Boy Scouts' financial adviser, received $19 million.

Rite Aid Corp. resolved a fight with its largest supplier of prescription drugs, McKesson Corp., that the retailer said threatened its ability to continue providing customers with life saving medicines and imperiled its ability to survive bankruptcy, Bloomberg News reported. Lawyers for the two companies said during a court hearing Tuesday in New Jersey that they’ve agreed in principal to a settlement that will end a lawsuit Rite Aid filed against McKesson over their supply agreement. The settlement ensures that Rite Aid’s stock of prescription drugs won’t be impacted during its chapter 11 case, the lawyers said. The deal avoids a potentially costly fight that could have hindered Rite Aid’s restructuring efforts. Rite Aid claimed McKesson was threatening to walk away from the supply agreement unless it paid for new goods when delivered, describing the effort as “a cynical ploy for negotiating leverage” over the retailer. McKesson argued the long-term supply deal ended prior to the bankruptcy. Rite Aid lawyer Josh Sussberg said the retailer has now agreed to pay McKesson within seven days of receiving new products, versus 19 days previously. Terms of the proposed settlement must be documented and the agreement might be challenged by other Rite Aid creditors, he added. Any settlement must be approved by Judge Michael Kaplan, who is overseeing Rite Aid’s chapter 11 case.

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried's lawyer on Tuesday said the now-bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange's investments were not "reckless and frivolous," pushing back against testimony by former executive Nishad Singh portraying its spending on marketing and celebrity endorsements as excessive, Reuters reported. Singh, FTX's former engineering chief, testified for a second straight day at Bankman-Fried's fraud trial in Manhattan federal court. Under cross-examination, Singh told the jury that he thought FTX would be able to stay in business upon learning in September 2022 of a $13 billion shortfall in customer funds, potentially bolstering Bankman-Fried's argument that he believed the exchange's troubles were manageable. FTX declared bankruptcy on Nov. 11, 2022. Singh testified on Monday that the company's venture investments and $1.1 billion in planned marketing deals, including naming rights to the arena where the NBA's Miami Heat play and featuring NFL quarterback Tom Brady in commercials, "reeked of excess and flashiness." Defense lawyer Mark Cohen on Tuesday asked Singh, one of three former members of Bankman-Fried's inner circle who have pleaded guilty to fraud and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors, whether promoting FTX's brand could be useful. "I understood it had business benefits and costs," Singh said in testimony that defense lawyers could use to argue that Bankman-Fried was making what he believed to be good-faith business decisions in shelling out funds for marketing and investments even if others disagreed.

The U.S. unit of cryptocurrency exchange Binance has halted withdrawal of dollars by its clients from the platform, its updated terms showed on Monday, Reuters reported. In early June, Binance.US had halted dollar deposits, after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) asked a court to freeze its assets. "In the event that customers wish to withdraw U.S. dollar funds from their account, they may do so by converting U.S. dollar funds to stablecoin or other digital assets, which can subsequently be withdrawn," the terms page said. The SEC had sued Binance, its CEO and founder Changpeng Zhao, and Binance.US's operation in June, alleging in 13 charges that Binance had engaged in a "web of deception," artificially inflated trading volumes and diverted customer funds.

Rite Aid appears to be pursuing a novel strategy to handle a huge number of opioid-related lawsuits by sidestepping plaintiffs until after filing for bankruptcy, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. The drugstore chain on Sunday became the first large company facing mass opioid liabilities to file chapter 11 without any agreement with opioid plaintiffs, who may end up getting very little from Rite Aid. Other companies facing opioid litigation, including drugmakers Purdue Pharma, Mallinckrodt, Endo and Insys Therapeutics, had all lined up settlements with at least some opioid plaintiffs before filing for bankruptcy. Rite Aid said that it intends to use bankruptcy to cut billions of dollars in financial debt and reduce its store count. It has a proposed deal with bondholders to hand them full equity control. The retailer said it also intends to address various litigation facing the company, including the more than 1,600 opioid lawsuits that have been a drain on its resources. “It’s unusual that there’s no explicit settlement with [opioid] victims, which was the case in most of the other opioid bankruptcy cases,” said Edward Neiger, a lawyer who has represented opioid plaintiffs in other chapter 11 proceedings. The Supreme Court is currently examining Purdue Pharma’s use of chapter 11 to resolve opioid lawsuits and bankruptcy courts’ practice of granting releases from liability for affiliates and other parties tied to a bankrupt company. If the Supreme Court rules against Purdue, the decision could outlaw third-party releases as a tool to forge settlements of opioid lawsuits and other mass torts. That possibility may give Rite Aid and other companies pause before reaching similar deals, Neiger said.