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Bankrupt U.S. coal producer Peabody Energy Corp., which is looking to sell assets in Australia, is seeking permission for Lazard Freres & Co LLC to provide merger and acquisition services for its foreign unit, according to court papers filed on Thursday, Reuters reported. Lazard has been serving as investment banker to Peabody since it filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy in April, but the engagement did not cover merger and acquisition services, which the world's largest private-sector coal company said it now needs. Peabody filed for protection from its creditors after a sharp drop in coal prices left it unable to service $10.1 billion in debt, much of which was incurred to finance an expansion in Australia.

Thousands of empty shipping containers, stranded in Southern California after the bankruptcy of South Korean ocean carrier Hanjin Shipping Co., may now have a way to get back to Asia, the Wall Street Journal reported today. The Port of Long Beach and Total Terminals International LLC (TTI) — which runs port terminals for Hanjin, including its Southern California operation in Long Beach — have arranged for a container ship to remove 4,300 containers that have been sitting in container yards and warehouse lots since the bankruptcy filing. Port officials said on Thursday that they expect the ship to arrive in the next several days. TTI will load containers onto the ship at cost and the port has agreed to waive wharfage fees. For weeks after Hanjin entered bankruptcy proceedings, most major West Coast ports were turning away loaded and empty Asia-bound containers owned or leased by Hanjin. Freight-handling businesses scrambled to rebook outbound loads on other carriers, but most of the empty containers stayed put.

As auto supplier Takata Corp. prepares for a possible U.S. bankruptcy filing, potential bidders are poring over a recent U.S. court ruling that could expose a buyer to liability for the company's defective air bags, sources have told Reuters. Takata faces potentially billions of dollars in costs from the world's largest automotive recall, stemming from millions of its air bags that were equipped with malfunctioning inflators. The Japanese company has said that it is seeking a financial backer. But interested bidders, if the parts maker goes up for sale, want Takata to put its U.S. business into bankruptcy first. General Motors filed for chapter 11 in 2009, selling its best assets to "new GM," scrubbed free of billions of dollars of debt, which enabled the company to withstand an economic crisis. In July, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that General Motors Co., the "new GM," could be sued over faulty ignition switches made by "old GM." "What that says to me: buyer beware," said Henry Jaffe of Pepper Hamilton in Wilmington, Del., who represents debtors and creditors. Jaffe, who took part in a special abiLIVE webinar with Greenberg Traurig, LLP’s John Hutton to examine the ruling, said that the Second Circuit’s decision could undercut what bidders are willing to pay for Takata. Read more. 

Click here to watch the abiLIVE webinar. http://cle.abi.org/product/no-cle-abi-live-2nd-circuit-decision-gm-incr…

Takata Corp. said that it wants to avoid bankruptcy globally because a court-led restructuring could disrupt the supply of parts to automakers, the first public comments the embattled air-bag supplier has made on an option being considered in the U.S., Bloomberg News reported today. “We hope to have out-of-court settlement and our position hasn’t changed since the beginning,” Chief Financial Officer Yoichiro Nomura said today after the Tokyo-based company reported earnings. “There’s no other option to ensure the stable supply of the products. Court-led bankruptcy will make it difficult for the business to continue.” Takata shares have fallen 14 percent since Bloomberg reported on Sept. 16 that some form of bankruptcy proceedings were being considered by bidders for the company, which is at the center of a record auto industry recall. Autoliv Inc., Key Safety Systems Inc., Flex-N-Gate Corp. and Daicel Corp. — bidding together with Bain Capital LP — proposed bankruptcy for Takata’s U.S. unit at meetings with automakers last week in New York as a way to limit liabilities.