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Investors led by Relativity Media LLC's founder and chief executive, Ryan Kavanaugh, have completed a deal to take control of the Hollywood studio the same week the company announced it had completed the sale of its television business to senior lenders, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported today. Kavanaugh's investors include supermarket mogul Ron Burkle, Chicago-based investor Joseph Nicholas and Orinda, Calif.-based VII Peaks Capital LLC, court papers show. The group said on Wednesday that it had completed transactions allowing it to take control of what remains of Relativity, buying out all but $60 million of the company's senior debt for $65 million in cash.

Junior bondholders in the Caesars Entertainment casino bankruptcy accused restructuring attorneys of allegedly misleading a judge and said that they should be disqualified from handling parts of the case, Reuters reported yesterday. The allegation adds to the bitterness of the $18 billion bankruptcy, which has pitted the private-equity owners of Caesars Entertainment Corp. against the junior creditors of the company's operating unit. In a Wednesday court filing, junior creditors said that they had unearthed evidence that they said showed that attorneys with Kirkland & Ellis, which represents the bankrupt operating unit CEOC, misled the court about potential conflicts. The junior creditors are represented by a team of lawyers from Jones Day, and they asked Bankruptcy Judge Benjamin Goldgar to address the matter at a hearing on Nov. 18. Judge Goldgar has already approved the hiring of Kirkland over a previous objection by junior creditors. Goldgar could decline to revisit the issue, or consider the request to disqualify some of Kirkland's retention.

Through the bankruptcy of invention start-up Quirky Inc., inventors who submitted their products to Quirky might now get the chance to regain full ownership of their inventions, the Wall Street Journal Bankruptcy Beat blog reported yesterday. The committee, appointed about a month ago to represent unsecured creditors—including inventors who receive royalties from the sales of their products through Quirky—is asking the bankruptcy court to slow down the Quirky sale process, in part to allow inventors that opportunity. “Upon information and belief, the Committee understands that the Debtors’ advisors have received interest from certain of the inventors in ‘buying back’ some of the Products,” the committee said in court documents.

Energy Future Holdings Corp. has sued to force the owner of 19.75 percent of its Oncor electricity-transmissions business to go along with a $12.2 billion deal designed to bail Energy Future out of bankruptcy, the Wall Street Journal reported today. Oncor, a cash-generating business that carries power to more than 3.2 million homes and businesses in Texas, is central to Energy Future’s chapter 11 exit proposal. It is set to be sold to an investment group led by Hunt Consolidated Inc., but minority stakeholder Texas Transmission Investment LLC is balking at the proposed sale. Energy Future on Monday asked a bankruptcy judge to enforce so-called drag-along rights in an agreement struck in 2008 after private-equity firms had taken over the Dallas energy giant, which was then called TXU Corp., in a debt-fueled deal.

Wilmington Trust, a representative for noteholders of Caesars Entertainment Corp.’s (CEC) bankrupt unit, has sued the casino operator for avoiding its written guarantee on repayment of more than $51 million of interest on the unit's debt, Reuters reported today. The lawsuit alleges that Caesars has not paid interest on 10.75 percent notes due 2016 issued by its unit Caesars Entertainment Operating Co. (CEOC), which filed for bankruptcy in January. The lawsuit filed by White & Case LLP today alleges that Caesars violated the U.S. Trust Indenture Act by voiding its guarantee of the operating unit's obligations. Wilmington Trust, which alleged that notes of about $479 million plus interest remain outstanding, said CEC had guaranteed payment of all principal and interest on the notes as and when due.

A New York state judge has sided with a group of lenders that are blocking an Arch Coal Inc. debt-swap deal, effectively halting a transaction that advocates have said would keep the coal company out of bankruptcy, the Wall Street Journal reported today. Judge Saliann Scarpulla of the New York State Supreme Court denied a request by an affiliate of GSO Capital Partners that she prevent a group of majority lenders from freezing the debt swap. The standard for granting such a request is that the judge must find that allowing the lenders to proceed would do “irreparable harm.” She didn’t find that to be the case. “Because I find that Plaintiff’s alleged harm can be fully compensated by money damages by the Directing Defendants, Plaintiff’s harm is not irreparable. Plaintiff argues that, if Arch enters bankruptcy, any claim for money damages against the Directing Defendants would be more complex to prove. This, however, is not sufficient to establish irreparable harm,” she said in her ruling issued on Friday. Arch Coal, one of the country’s largest coal producers, is trying to get creditors to swap their debt in exchanges designed to improve Arch’s balance sheet as the coal market faces continued weakness.

The judge overseeing the criminal case against three former executives of defunct U.S. law firm Dewey & LeBoeuf declared a mistrial yesterday following over three weeks of jury deliberations, Reuters reported yesterday. The jury sent a note to the court saying for the third time it was deadlocked on the major counts against former Dewey Chairman Steven Davis, Executive Director Stephen DiCarmine and Chief Financial Officer Joel Sanders, including grand larceny, scheming to defraud and violating New York's securities law, the Martin Act. The three defendants were accused of using illegal accounting adjustments to mask the firm's teetering finances between 2008 and 2012 to convince lenders and investors, including Bank of America Corp. and HSBC Holdings Plc, that the law firm was still healthy.

The U.S. Trustee's Office and Erlanger Health System are both raising numerous objections to a plan by bankruptcy trustee Ronald Glass to auction off the financially failing Hutcheson Medical Center, The Chattanoogan reported today. The Fort Oglethorpe, Tenn.-based hospital has laid off a number of additional employees since the auction plan was presented. Assistant U.S. Trustee Martin Ochs said, "If the nursing home assets are sold, but there is not a sale of the hospital facility without sufficient funds reserved from the sale proceeds, the trustee will be left with inadequate funds to operate the hospital." A hearing on the proposed auction is set for Wednesday morning in the bankruptcy court in Rome, Ga.

For more information on hospital and health care bankruptcies, be sure to pick up a copy of the ABI Health Care Insolvency Manual, Third Edition.

Endeavour International Corp. Friday won approval for its debt-for-equity swap with bondholders, the latest company to use a structured dismissal to end its stalled bankruptcy case, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported today. Bankruptcy Judge Kevin Carey signed off on the oil and gas company's proposal to hand control of its U.K. assets — which make up more than 90 percent of its business — to a group of senior bondholders and wrap up its affairs outside of chapter 11. Instead of ending its bankruptcy case with a chapter 11 plan that follows specific rules for debt repayment prescribed by Congress, Endeavour and its senior creditors have agreed to set aside money and settle their differences outside the bankruptcy courtroom.

Texas’s consumer watchdog has reached a deal with a Dallas manufacturer that once sold solar panels that weren’t quite “Made in the U.S.A.,” despite their label, the Wall Street Journal Bankruptcy Beat blog reported yesterday. In a new settlement with the Texas attorney general’s office, officials who shut down 1SolTech Inc.’s operations earlier this year agreed that the company should pay a civil penalty of $5 million and roughly $2.8 million in restitution for customers who bought the solar panels. In court papers, 1SolTech Inc. admitted that it had bought Chinese-made solar panels and resold them as “Made in the USA by 1SolTech, Inc.” Some of the panels were also falsely labeled as having met certain testing standards, according to documents filed in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Sherman, Texas. Lawyers in the Texas attorney general’s office sued the 1SolTech in September 2013, accusing it of violating the state’s consumer-protection laws. The company filed for bankruptcy less than a month later and eventually shut down.