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Vice Media is set to be acquired by a group of its lenders including Fortress Investment Group and Soros Fund Management, capping off a sale process for a once thriving digital-media company that failed in a difficult environment for publishers, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. A group of Vice Media’s lenders led by Fortress and Soros offered $225 million to take over the company, which filed for bankruptcy last month. On Thursday, Vice filed a notice of an amended bid from the lender group that showed its takeover would value the company at $350 million. Brooklyn, N.Y.-based Vice was soliciting outside bids, but no offers that the company considered superior emerged, the company’s co-chief executives said. “While we received multiple bids for the company, none of the other bids rose to the level of being deemed a superior bid,” Bruce Dixon and Hozefa Lokhandwala, Vice’s co-CEOs, said Thursday. The winning bid needs to be approved by a bankruptcy court. Vice is scheduled to have a hearing in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York today about its sale to Fortress and Soros.

Wheels Up Experience, an upstart in the membership-driven private jet industry, is retooling its business model and consulting with restructuring advisers to try to survive the post-COVID era and avoid the bankruptcy filings that have plagued other pandemic darlings, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Air travelers flocked to Wheels Up after the pandemic’s onset, helping the company go public in a mid-2021 merger with a special-purpose acquisition company. Since then, its stock price has dwindled from a $110 high to a fraction of that amid widening losses and the unexpected departure in May of founder and former chief executive Kenneth Dichter. The private jet service is now refocusing on its busiest flight corridors and curtailing service elsewhere. It has also hired restructuring lawyers from Kirkland & Ellis as it evaluates its options, a company representative said. The representative said Wheels Up is “working with a number of advisors and industry participants around securing new strategic investments, raising capital, and executing previously disclosed strategic divestitures.”

Silicon Valley Bank customers whose deposits were seized by U.S. authorities after the lender’s collapse are fighting back, the Wall Street Journal reported. Customers who held money in the bank’s Cayman Islands branch found their accounts wiped down to zero after SVB collapsed in March, because a U.S. move to guarantee deposits didn’t apply to them. Their pain was compounded when they found out First Citizens BancShares had acquired their loans from SVB — meaning they had lost their money, but kept their debts. Several firms including venture-capital funds in Hong Kong and mainland China have pushed back, filing a petition in a Cayman Islands court last week to initiate a windup procedure of the former U.S. bank’s branch there. The depositors held around $38 million in their Caymans SVB accounts, according to the petition. The depositors hope the move will increase their chances of getting their money back from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which seized their funds. The petition, filed by law firm Campbells to the Cayman court on June 13, argues that it is “just and equitable” for SVB’s Cayman Islands branch to be wound up, since the branch was unable to pay debt. The petition also asks the court to approve the appointment of official liquidators to help find ways to retrieve the funds. The liquidators will be able to investigate and keep depositors informed and to ensure they are treated fairly, said Paul Kennedy, a partner at Campbells.

A bankruptcy judge has ruled to allow a Berkshire Hathaway–affiliated defunct talcum powder supplier to remain in bankruptcy to address thousands of personal injury cases, rejecting a request from a state court-appointed receiver to throw the case out of chapter 11, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Judge Michael Kaplan of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New Jersey said in his ruling Tuesday that the board of directors of former talc supplier Whittaker, Clark & Daniels had the authority to place the company under chapter 11 protection in April. The judge declined to dismiss the case requested by the receiver appointed by a South Carolina trial judge in March. The receiver, Peter Protopapas, was appointed after Whittaker Clark was hit by a $29 million verdict and found to be on the verge of insolvency. He argued in bankruptcy court that the appointment of the receiver by the state court stripped the company board’s authority to file for bankruptcy. Judge Kaplan said in his ruling that he can’t give weight to that argument, which he said was based on the receiver’s “mistaken understanding” of the receivership order. “This court will not, and cannot, give force to any subjective belief that the receivership order achieved something beyond the powers outlined therein — especially when that expansive interpretation would contravene case law and the Bankruptcy Code,” Judge Kaplan wrote in Tuesday’s ruling.

Generic-drug maker Mallinckrodt yesterday said that it set aside more than $3.4 million in executive retention bonuses in the event of a possible filing for yet another bankruptcy. The move is latest sign of difficulty for the company, which has struggled to pay its bills in the wake of a $1.7 billion opioid settlement following allegations it helped propel the nation’s opioid crisis. The disclosure yesterday comes after the company last week said it reached an agreement to push back the due date of a $200 million payment from that settlement from June 16 to June 23. The company this month also opted not to make interest payments, and disclosed that some debt holders had proposed a second bankruptcy filing. Mallinckrodt emerged from chapter 11 last year.

A nonprofit law school in Downtown San Francisco faces an existential vote on Wednesday, as students and faculty join forces to keep the 122-year-old institution alive, the San Francisco Standard reported. Founded in 1901, Golden Gate University has struggled to stay afloat in recent years, but the surrounding neighborhood’s deteriorating economic condition has taken its toll. A January 2022 plan to stay afloat by selling property sputtered out with the “precipitous devaluation” of Downtown commercial real estate, the university said in a letter to the law school community last Friday. The administration acknowledged that a proposal regarding the law school’s long-term future exists. However, the university neither confirmed nor denied that outright closure or giving up its accreditation with the American Bar Association were on the table. Students, faculty and alumni, however, were told that the Board of Trustees would either close the law school altogether or relinquish its accreditation, according to a letter circulating to save the school. Golden Gate Law currently has about 200 students, according to Student Bar Association president Mohammed Jamal, and needs some $50 million over five years to avoid bankruptcy.