%1

Specialty lender Fifth Street Asset Management Inc. is exploring a sale amid a deterioration in its loan portfolio and management turnover, the Wall Street Journal reported today. The Greenwich, Conn., company is working with Morgan Stanley to sound out potential buyers, according to people familiar with the matter. The process is in an early stage, and there is no assurance it will yield a transaction. Fifth Street explored a sale last year but failed to come to terms with bidders, the people said. Fifth Street manages $4.7 billion in corporate loans and other investments.

Creditors of a failed nutritional supplement company have dropped their effort to claw back $756,000 the company had donated to True Life Church, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported today. For the creditors of SupplementWarehouse.com Inc., a former Oak Creek firm that once employed more than 60 people and had annual sales of $36 million, that means an extra financial hit. For True Life, it means that the apostolic congregation will hold on to its church building and continue as a viable organization.

New Jersey state legislators are calling on federal and state agencies to investigate whether Argentina’s state-run oil company is using a subsidiary’s bankruptcy to avoid paying for a cleanup of the contamination in the Passaic River, NorthJersey.com reported today. The New Jersey Senate and Assembly environmental committees held an unusual joint hearing yesterday on a resolution calling for the investigations into YPF SA and its bankrupt subsidiary, Maxus Energy. The committees unanimously approved the resolution. Of particular concern to state senator Bob Smith, who heads the senate committee, was a document from 1996 that he said appears to show a scheme laid out to siphon assets away from Maxus so it could declare bankruptcy and avoid paying out possibly hundreds of millions of dollars toward cleaning up the Passaic, which is so polluted that the lower portion of the river is a Superfund site.