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Oi SA is sticking to its year-end goals of tripling subscribers who use multiple services and boosting investments by 25 percent even as the phone carrier works through Brazil’s biggest-ever bankruptcy, Chief Executive Officer Marco Schroeder said, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. The company is current in payments to suppliers and aims to continue on that front to guarantee service to customers during the bankruptcy process, Schroeder said. In March, Oi offered a package of mobile, landline, broadband and pay-TV services for customers across the country. Oi Total had 320,000 subscribers as of June and aims to reach 1 million this year, the company said. Oi filed for bankruptcy protection in June after failing to reach a restructuring agreement with creditors covering 65.4 billion reais ($20 billion) of debt. As it stops servicing its debt, Oi will have more cash to invest in its business, Schroeder said. 

SunEdison Inc.’s assets in bankruptcy are now worth $1 billion to $1.5 billion, based in part on recent offers to buy some of its solar and wind farms, a company financial adviser testified, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. Homer Parkhill of Rothschild Inc., which is counseling the renewable-energy giant on the sale process following its April chapter 11 filing, offered the new valuation in Manhattan federal court yesterday. The estimate replaces a figure of $850 million that Parkhill put forward in June. The latest price tag also factors in recent rises in the shares of SunEdison’s two yieldcos, Parkhill said. The company holds controlling stakes in both yieldcos, which were set up to buy energy projects that SunEdison develops. Read more. 

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U.S. oil and gas producers are selling shares at record speed, a sharp turnaround from past years when debt markets were the industry’s favored source of cash, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. There are two main reasons behind the shift: First, the downturn made it tougher and more expensive to borrow. Second, using equity can help strengthen a company’s balance sheet at a time when the oil bust is dragging into its third year. The latest is Laredo Petroleum Inc. which said yesterday that it’s selling 13 million shares to repay debt and finance a recent acquisition. U.S. energy producers have raised $16 billion from share sales since the start of the year, more than half of the total $29 billion raised by the industry, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. By comparison, equity accounted for 25 percent or less of the capital raised for the past five years. Read more. 

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Popular country music venue Cowboys Dancehall owes almost $10 million to banks, auto companies, government agencies and individuals, according to a new filing detailing the venue’s assets and debts, the San Antonio News-Express reported today. The document, filed on Monday in the Western District of Texas, gives the clearest picture of the dance hall’s finances since Cowboys Far West Ltd., the Arlington, Texas-based partnership that owns the dance hall, filed for chapter 11 protection in June to stall a foreclosure sale on the venue’s $5.3 million, 16.6-acre property on the city’s Northeast Side. Cowboys lists $9.8 million in liabilities to its creditors — almost $1 million less than the company’s reported total assets: $10.51 million. Court documents show the dance hall’s 2016 annual revenue is on track to fall by almost 40 percent from previous years.

Oil-field-services provider Seventy Seven Energy Inc. is preparing to get out of bankruptcy after a judge agreed to approve a reorganization plan that would give the Oklahoma company access to up to $100 million in a new borrowing deal, the Wall Street Journal reported today. Bankruptcy Judge Laurie Selber Silverstein said in court yesterday that she would give Seventy Seven Energy permission to put its reorganization plan into action. The plan would allow bondholders owed $1.1 billion to take over most of the ownership in the company, which provides drilling, hydraulic fracturing and oilfield-rental services to exploration and production companies. Under the company’s reorganization plan, its unsecured debt would be fully paid. Shareholders would receive warrants for 20 percent of new common stock. Seventy Seven Energy filed for bankruptcy on June 7, facing roughly $1.7 billion in debt.

Venoco Inc. won bankruptcy-court approval yesterday for a restructuring plan that will slash nearly $1 billion in debt from the oil and gas producer’s books, the Wall Street Journal reported today. Bankruptcy Judge Kevin Gross confirmed Venoco’s chapter 11 plan of reorganization, paving the way for the Denver-based company to exit bankruptcy protection. Smoothing the way for Venoco to secure the court’s approval was an early settlement of potential legal claims by one major bondholder and a last-minute deal to resolve the objections to the restructuring from two other bondholders. Amid the decline in oil and gas prices, Venoco sought chapter 11 protection in March after securing support for its restructuring from secured bondholders Apollo Capital Management and MAST Capital Management. Apollo, a unit of New York-based Apollo Global Management, and Boston-based MAST agreed to forgive some $339 million in first- and second-lien bond debt in exchange for most of the new equity in the restructured Venoco. Apollo representatives are also slated to get three of the company’s four board seats when it leaves bankruptcy, Venoco lawyer Robert Burns said at yesterday’s hearing. Read more. (Subscription required.) 

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Get a better understanding of what happens when an oil, gas or other natural resources company goes bankrupt. Order your copy of ABI's revised and expanded When Gushers Go Dry: The Essentials of Oil & Gas Bankruptcy, Second Edition.