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A little-known Wall Street lender with a background financing dump trucks and helicopters is bankrolling a trade case that’s threatening the $29 billion U.S. solar industry, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. SQN Capital Management typically finances and leases crucial, if prosaic, business equipment: think cement mixers, office furniture, honey-production machines, farm equipment. A $50 million loan to Suniva Inc. was one of its biggest ever, and when that loan went south with Suniva’s April bankruptcy filing, SQN joined the Georgia-based solar manufacturer’s improbable plan: ask President Donald Trump to impose tariffs on cheap imports from Asia. SQN is funding Suniva during bankruptcy, and the companies say that their goal is to protect solar manufacturing in the U.S.; most of the industry has lined up against them, arguing that the federal trade case threatens to double the price of solar panels and drag down installations.

Litigation funder Longford Capital Management LP is expected to announce today that it closed a $500 million fund that will be used to back corporate lawsuits in exchange for a cut of any eventual settlement or judgment, the Wall Street Journal reported today. Competing litigation-finance firms have raised and deployed hundreds of millions of dollars more in recent months. The industry has accelerated as investors — including pension funds, family offices and wealthy individuals — are drawn to a new asset that isn’t tied to the broader markets. The investments traditionally have funded plaintiffs in corporate litigation, though funders have begun looking for more creative ways to support defense-side work as the industry has matured. Longford said it attracted enough interest from investors to raise $1 billion for the recently closed fund, its second, but decided to cap it at half that. The firm’s first fund raised $56.5 million. Since its founding in late 2011, Longford has put $137 million into 102 lawsuits. So far, 43 of those have settled or otherwise been resolved and have been “very successful for investors,” said William Strong, Longford’s chairman and managing director. He declined to discuss the exact rate of return.

The CEO of U.S. nuclear reactor maker Westinghouse said that the company does not expect to come out of chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings before the end of 2017 but hopes to complete restructuring in early 2018, Reuters reported. Cost overruns at four nuclear reactors it was building in the United States pushed Westinghouse, a unit of Japan’s Toshiba Corp, into bankruptcy in March. Utilities in the U.S. state of South Carolina abandoned construction of two of those reactors in July. Asked when the company could emerge from chapter 11 proceedings, Westinghouse Chief Executive Officer Jose Gutierrez told Reuters: “The timeline is complicated, but it will obviously not happen this year.” He said it could happen quickly once a solution was found for the remaining two U.S. reactors under construction in Georgia, adding that the rest of the firm was in good shape. Southern Co, the utility building two reactors at Georgia’s Vogtle plant, has hired Bechtel to finalise work and is in talks with Westinghouse about the nuclear part of the project, scheduled for completion by 2022, six years late.

NRG Energy Inc.’s plan for a friendly divorce from GenOn Energy Inc. faces a court test this week as owners of power plants in Maryland ask a judge to award them as much as $620 million in damages, the Wall Street Journal reported today. A win by the power plant owners would be a loss for GenOn’s bondholders and a probable upset of the chapter 11 plan. Bondholders back a restructuring plan that separates GenOn from NRG, swapping out $1.8 billion in debt for equity in a stand-alone power-generation company. NRG acquired GenOn in 2012 for $1.7 billion. With confirmation hearings slated to start Nov. 13, the question of how much the plant owners could be owed is a major factor. Judge David Jones in Houston is being asked to set the value of the plant owners’ claims; the higher the estimated figure, the more leverage they have in deciding GenOn’s fate. Hurt by low energy prices, NRG has embarked on a program of unloading assets and cutting costs, and GenOn’s June bankruptcy filing is part of the transformation process.

Ten years ago this week, the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Diego agreed to pay $198.1 million to settle the lawsuits filed by Lynch and 143 other adults, the San Diego Union-Tribune reported yesterday. As children, each had been sexually assaulted by a priest or, in one case, a layman supervising altar boys. This was a landmark moment in one the largest scandals in the church's 2,000-year-old history. From Dublin to Manila, Boston to Portland, Ore., Catholic officials were hauled into court and forced to account for shielding predatory clerics, often for decades. The San Diego settlement was the nation’s second largest, trailing only the Los Angeles diocese’s $660 million. By at least one measurement, though, San Diego’s settlement was more significant. After !legal fees, the 508 victims in L.A. averaged a payout of $780,000. In San Diego, the average was $825,000. Absorbing these damages led the San Diego diocese to file for chapter 11 bankruptcy. In the end, insurance paid $76 million and the Diocese of San Bernardino, which had part of this diocese, contributed almost $15 million. Selling properties and tapping its bank accounts, San Diego paid the remaining $107 million. Seven months after going to bankruptcy court, the diocese’s case was dismissed.