Bankrupt crypto exchange FTX has recovered over $7.3 billion in cash and liquid crypto assets, an increase of more than $800 million since January, the company's attorney said on Wednesday at a U.S. bankruptcy court hearing in Delaware, Reuters reported. FTX attorney Andy Dietderich said the company is starting to think about its future after months of effort devoted to collecting resources and figuring out what went wrong under the leadership of indicted ex-founder Sam Bankman-Fried. Bankman-Fried has pleaded not guilty. "The situation has stabilized, and the dumpster fire is out," Dietderich said. FTX has benefited from a recent rise in crypto prices, Dietderich said. Its total recovery would be valued at $6.2 billion based on crypto prices from November 2022, when it filed for bankruptcy after traders pulled $6 billion from the platform in three days and rival exchange Binance abandoned a rescue deal. FTX's new CEO John Ray has detailed improper fund transfers and poor accounting at the collapsed crypto exchange, describing it as a "complete failure" of controls. Read more.
In related news, FTX may use money marked to repay customers to restart its failed crypto exchange because the project would require a significant amount of cash, a lawyer for the company said in court yesterday, according to Bloomberg News. The company is still in the early stages of deciding whether to bring back the exchange, which allowed customers to trade digital assets before FTX collapsed, Andrew G. Dietderich, an FTX attorney with law firm Sullivan & Cromwell told U.S. Bankruptcy Judge John T. Dorsey. The company could also try to raise money to fund a restart or drop the entire concept. Read more.
A Johnson & Johnson unit said cancer victims who refuse to settle with the company are attempting to intimidate other claimants from signing onto an $8.9 billion deal to end lawsuits over allegedly tainted baby powder, Bloomberg News reported. The health-care giant is trying for the second time to use the bankruptcy of its LTL Management to round up support for a plan that would settle more than 40,000 lawsuits that allege baby powder contained talc that was tinged with asbestos, a toxic substance. LTL has the backing of 60,000 victims, or about two thirds of all claimants, lawyer Gregory M. Gordon said in federal court on Tuesday. The company must get to 75% to have a chance at winning approval for the deal from U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Michael Kaplan. The holdouts are working to block the company from reaching that goal, Gordon said. As the bankruptcy goes forward, LTL and J&J will present evidence to “show an aggressive, concerted effort by the plaintiff firms on this committee to scuttle this agreement through threats and intimidation directed at LTL, J&J” and plaintiffs who support the plan, Gordon said.
Johnson & Johnson’s second attempt to resolve talc lawsuits in bankruptcy should be dismissed as an unprecedented fraud designed to deny plaintiffs just compensation, lawyers representing cancer victims argued in a Monday court filing, Reuters reported. The attorneys contend J&J defied a January appeals court rejection of its first attempt to settle the litigation, noting that a J&J subsidiary refiled for chapter 11 about two hours after a court dismissed its first bankruptcy. The lawyers blasted the move as the "largest intentional fraudulent transfer in United States history." Johnson & Johnson is offering to settle all claims for $8.9 billion, up from its original offer of $2 billion. Monday's legal broadside challenged the company’s latest gambit as an unlawful abuse of the chapter 11 system, echoing earlier objections to its first effort to resolve the lawsuits. In October 2021, J&J executed a controversial legal maneuver known as a Texas two-step. The tactic involved dividing its consumer business in two and then offloading tens of thousands of talc lawsuits onto a newly created subsidiary, which almost immediately filed for chapter 11. The goal: to halt the avalanche of lawsuits and force plaintiffs into a global settlement in bankruptcy court. The plaintiffs allege J&J's talc-based Baby Powder and similar cosmetic products caused ovarian cancer and mesothelioma. The company maintains its talc products are safe.
Cineworld said today that it had filed a reorganization plan in a Texas bankruptcy court that will effectively wipe out existing shareholdings, sending its stock to an all-time low, Reuters reported. The filing formalizes a deal laid out on April 3 that includes plans to cut debt by about $4.53 billion and raise $2.26 billion in funds to emerge from bankruptcy. It does not provide for any recovery for its existing shareholders, the group said. Shares in the world's second-largest cinema chain operator fell to 1.5 pence on Tuesday, and have lost more than 99% since it listed in 2007. Cineworld, which placed a majority of its business under U.S. chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in September, last week dropped plans to sell its businesses in the U.S., the UK, and Ireland after failing to find a buyer.The group's chapter 11 companies are seeking to confirm the plan on an "expeditious timeline", Cineworld said, adding that it continues to operate its global business and cinemas as usual without interruption.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) sent letters on Sunday to 14 of the largest depositors with Silicon Valley Bank that raised concerns over the failed bank’s relationship with some of the venture capitalists and tech founders who made up much of its customer base, Bloomberg News reported. In letters reviewed by Bloomberg that were sent to companies including Circle Internet Financial, BILL Holdings Inc., BlockFi Inc. and Eiger BioPharmaceuticals Inc., Warren and Ocasio-Cortez asked questions about the nature of their connections with SVB. Those included the length of their relationship and the amount of money they had deposited with the bank, which collapsed in March after investors and depositors tried to pull out $42 billion in a single day. The two Democrats, who have been vocal critics of SVB and its executives, also want to know whether board members, executives or investors had received special benefits, such as lines of credits, from SVB. In particular, the lawmakers are interested in reports that said SVB coddled some of its largest venture capitalists and showered them with special perks, and in return the VC firms gave the bank access to huge unsecured sources of short-term funding, the letters said. The lawmakers asked for the answers to these questions to be provided by April 24.
A bankruptcy judge yesterday dismissed the chapter 11 case of Legacy Lofts on St. Mary’s LLC after the townhouse developer failed to comply with court requirements, the San Antonio Express-News reported. It had filed for bankruptcy protection in December to stop a foreclosure on a portion the property along North St. Mary’s and East Euclid avenues where it built 19 townhouse units. Since entering bankruptcy, Legacy Lofts had not filed monthly operating reports or paid quarterly fees as required, according to James Rose Jr., an attorney for the U.S. Trustee’s office. Legacy Lofts also failed to file a reorganization plan, Rose told Chief U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Craig Gargotta during a Monday hearing. On March 20, Rose filed a motion to have the case dismissed or converted to a chapter 7 liquidation. Allen DeBard, Legacy Lofts' bankruptcy lawyer, did not oppose the motion to dismiss the case.
The former parent companies of Maxus Energy Corp. reached a $575 million settlement on Thursday to end a longstanding bankruptcy-court lawsuit over who should pay to clean up the contaminated Passaic River in New Jersey, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Argentine energy company YPF SA has agreed to pay half of the settlement, according to a securities filing by YPF on Friday. Spain’s Repsol SA, another former owner of Maxus, has agreed to pay the other half, a company representative said. The settlement amounts to a fraction of the $14 billion that the remnants of Maxus have sought, although it isn’t unusual for a party demanding large damages to end up with a much smaller settlement amount. Occidental Chemical Corp., which shares liabilities for the Passaic cleanup with Maxus, also agreed to drop all claims against YPF and Repsol related to Maxus, the Passaic River and other areas subject to environmental remediation, according to YPF’s filing.
"Hubris, incompetence, and greed" led to the implosion of crypto exchange FTX, the now-defunct entity's debtors said in a Sunday report detailing control failures at the exchange, according to a report in Business Insider. In a 39-page strongly-worded report filed to the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware, the debtors — which includes FTX Trading and affiliates — further alleged that FTX lacked basic accounting and financial controls and was under the command of a small group of individuals who "stifled dissent." "These individuals stifled dissent, commingled and misused corporate and customer funds, lied to third parties about their business, joked internally about their tendency to lose track of millions of dollars in assets, and thereby caused the FTX Group to collapse as swiftly as it had grown," the debtors wrote in their first report since the exchange's collapse in November. "While the FTX Group's failure is novel in the unprecedented scale of harm it caused in a nascent industry, many of its root causes are familiar: hubris, incompetence, and greed," they said. FTX's implosion was shocking and swift. The exchange — worth $32 billion in early 2022 — filed for chapter 11 protection on November 11 of the same year, after a week of a liquidity crisis. The crisis was followed by swift criminal cases against the company's top brass. Sam Bankman-Fried, a high-profile cofounder of the exchange and former CEO, pleaded not guilty in the U.S. government's criminal case against him and is scheduled for a trial in October. Gary Wang, another cofounder, and Caroline Ellison, former CEO of FTX subsidiary Alameda Research, have pleaded guilty and are working with prosecutors. Former engineering chief Nishad Singh also pleaded guilty.
