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The families of Sandy Hook school shooting victims voted overwhelmingly in favor of a plan to wrap up Alex Jones’ bankruptcy proceedings by liquidating the right wing talk show host’s assets, Bloomberg Law reported. Jones’ general unsecured creditors — comprised mostly of Sandy Hook families holding about $1.5 billion in defamation judgments against the famed conspiracy theorist — voted 100% in favor of a chapter 11 plan that would methodically liquidate and redistribute his property and cash, while preserving potential legal actions against parties affiliated with Jones and his Infowars program. An official committee appointed to represent Jones’ unsecured creditors notified the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas on Feb. 16 that of 23 liquidation plan ballots distributed to creditors, it received 21 back — all supporting the committee’s liquidation proposal. The vote indicates the creditors’ preference over a competing plan submitted by Jones that would allow him to reorganize by preserving parts of his media empire and paying the group at least $5.5 million a year over 10 years. His plan would provide additional creditor recoveries out of disposable income from Jones’ bankrupt Infowars parent company, portions of Jones’ personal income, and the proceeds from selling various personal assets.

The U.S. Justice Department’s bankruptcy watchdog accused Sorrento Therapeutics lawyers of submitting false paperwork to justify the company’s chapter 11 filing in Houston, saying that the mailbox location it cited as a principal place of business was created only hours ahead of its bankruptcy, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Kevin Epstein, the U.S. trustee for the Southern District of Texas, said that on Feb. 12, 2023, a lawyer for Sorrento rented a mailbox at a UPS in the Woodlands, a Houston suburb, on behalf of Scintilla Pharmaceuticals, a Sorrento subsidiary. Both Sorrento and Scintilla are based in San Diego. Scintilla wasn’t registered or licensed to do business in Texas, Epstein said. It had been dormant since about 2019, with no employees or business operations, and its only asset was a $60,000 bank balance that Sorrento had wired to it days before the bankruptcy filing, he said. Ten hours after establishing the mailbox, Scintilla filed its chapter 11 petition in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Houston stating that the mailbox was its principal place of business, while still listing its San Diego office as its mailing address, court records show. Sorrento, Scintilla’s parent company, then filed its own chapter 11 petition in Houston. The Scintilla petition was signed by Henry Ji, Sorrento’s chief executive, and Matthew Cavenaugh, a partner at the Texas law firm Jackson Walker. Veronica Polnick, another partner at Jackson Walker, rented the mailbox on behalf of Scintilla, Epstein said.

Radio and podcast company Audacy Inc. received court approval on Tuesday to emerge from bankruptcy and hand ownership to creditors including Soros Fund Management, Bloomberg News reported. Audacy — the second-largest radio broadcaster in the US — will slash nearly $1.7 billion of debt from its balance sheet through its restructuring plan, according to court papers. Existing shareholders will be wiped out while high-ranking creditors, including the investment firm founded by billionaire George Soros, will be repaid with stock in the restructured company. Audacy’s bankruptcy plan was unanimously approved by the company’s senior lenders, according to Caroline Reckler, an attorney with Latham & Watkins who represents the company. A single shareholder objected to the plan during the court hearing on Tuesday, arguing that liquidating the company would provide a better recovery for equity holders. Despite the shareholder objection, Bankruptcy Judge Chris Lopez approved the proposal during the hearing in Houston. “The liquidation analysis shows that the value never gets to equity,” he said.

A bankruptcy judge has ruled that Rudy Giuliani, the once-respected former mayor of New York City, can appeal the $146 million verdict after he was found liable of defaming two Georgia elections workers — if he uses pre-approved donors to pay the legal expenses, NBCNews.com reported. In December, an eight-person jury awarded Ruby Freeman and her daughter, Wandrea "Shaye" Moss, the multimillion-dollar judgment after Giuliani was found to have defamed them, which the mother-daughter duo said had changed their lives forever and caused them to be flooded with a torrent of racist and violent threats. Giuliani baselessly accused them of trying to commit fraud in Georgia as part of a multifaceted effort to overturn Donald Trump's 2020 election defeat. Giuliani filed for bankruptcy in New York in December after the federal judge in his Washington case ordered him to start paying the Georgia election workers. On Tuesday, the bankruptcy judge assigned to Giuliani's case in New York said the former mayor must seek the judge's approval before any third-party payment of fees and expenses. Those fees cannot come from Giuliani's existing assets, the judge said. "Any fees and expenses incurred by the Debtor and his advisors in the Freeman Litigation in connection with any Post-Trial Filings and the Notice of Appeal shall not be paid by, and shall not result in a claim against, the Debtor or his estate," U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Sean Lane wrote. In a court filing last week, Freeman and Moss noted that Giuliani's son was president of Giuliani Defense, a legal defense fund, and said it was "essential to obtain clarity on how the Legal Defense Funds were themselves funded." On Monday, Giuliani declared that he had not directly or indirectly donated any money to either of his legal defense funds.

The Archdiocese of Santa Fe is being accused of reneging on a promise to publicly post the names of clergy who were accused of child sexual abuse in claims submitted during its long-running chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization, the Albuquerque Journal reported. Lawyers for a woman who contends she was first abused as a child in 1957 by the Rev. Richard Spellman say church officials are violating the terms of the bankruptcy settlement agreement that ended the case in December 2022. The archdiocese agreed to pay $121 million to 400 or so sex abuse survivors who submitted claims in the case. But archdiocese attorneys have disputed the notion that the settlement also requires disclosure of alleged perpetrators whose names surfaced during the confidential claims process. They contend that the archdiocese is required by the agreement to list on its website the names of "all known past and present clergy perpetrators of ASF who have been determined by the Archbishop in consultation" with an independent review board to be credibly accused of sexual abuse. Levi Monagle, one of the attorneys representing Mela LaJeunesse, filed a motion Tuesday disputing that interpretation and asked the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New Mexico to intervene.

The Reno City Center project, located at the old Harrah's building, has filed for chapter 11 protection, 2News.com reported. The filing, dated February 16th, was made through the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the District of Nevada and lists Reno City Center LLC as a Delaware limited liability company. Last September it was reported that the project was approved for a non-restrictive gaming license and an on-premises alcohol license for PKWAY Tavern. There's no mention within the bankruptcy filing whether the above licenses are affected, or whether the entire project will stop, or move forward. The voluntary petition mentions numerous creditors.

When the world’s most valuable lithium company last year announced plans for a $1.3 billion plant in South Carolina, local officials hailed it as transformative for the Palmetto State. The high-tech project from Charlotte, N.C.-based Albemarle was designed to process different sources of lithium, including from recycled batteries, and serve as a supplier of the critical mineral for South Carolina’s burgeoning electric-vehicle industry. Less than a year later, those plans have been hobbled by a crash in battery metal prices, undercut by a slowdown in electric-vehicle sales growth in the U.S. and China, the Wall Street Journal reported. Albemarle has deferred spending on the project, amid companywide cost-cutting that includes layoffs and delays to other investments as well. Producers of lithium and nickel, which are used in lithium-ion batteries for EVs, have been stalling projects and closing mines to save cash after a painfully quick fall in commodity prices. Prices of lithium are down as much as 90% since the start of last year, while the price of nickel has roughly halved.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito on Friday temporarily halted the Boy Scouts of America's $2.46 billion settlement of decades of sex abuse claims, which is being appealed by a group of 144 abuse claimants, Reuters reported. Alito's brief order freezing the settlement gives the court more time to decide a Feb. 9 request by these abuse claimants to block the settlement from moving forward. They contend the deal unlawfully stops them from pursuing lawsuits against organizations that are not bankrupt, such as churches that ran scouting programs, local Boy Scouts councils and insurers that provided coverage to the Boy Scouts organization. Justice Alito stepped in to halt the settlement because he handles certain requests involving cases from a group of states including Delaware, where the Boy Scouts matter was decided. The settlement involves more than 82,000 men who have said they were abused as children by troop leaders while in the Boy Scouts. Doug Kennedy, an abuse survivor who co-led the official committee representing abuse claimants in the bankruptcy, called the delay a "horrible" result. Survivors have already waited for decades for their abuse to be addressed, and 86% of abuse survivors voted to support the Boy Scouts settlement in bankruptcy court, Kennedy said. The trustee in charge of administering the Boy Scouts settlement, retired bankruptcy judge Barbara Houser, said Alito's order will suspend all work on the settlement, including evaluating claims and mailing checks to abuse survivors. The settlement trust has already paid nearly $8 million to more than 3,000 men. The Boy Scouts of America noted that Alito's order was only a short-term measure and said that it hopes the Supreme Court will swiftly deny the request for a longer pause, which would "inflict severe harm on both the Scouting movement and Scouting-abuse survivors."

Small businesses struggling to find funding have turned to alternative options such as merchant cash advances in recent years. Such deals have threatened the existence of some of these mom-and-pop operations, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. More than 100 businesses that filed for chapter 11 since the start of 2023 have attributed their bankruptcies at least partly to cash advances, up from at least 68 for 2022 and 16 for 2021, according to a Wall Street Journal review of court records. A Brooklyn clam bar visited by celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, Brooklyn retail chain Showfields, known for showcasing local vendors and artists, and, last week, Florida-based countertop maker International Granite & Stone are among those restructuring in chapter 11. These merchant cash financiers, estimated to be about 100 participants, provided $19 billion in 2019, up from $8.6 billion in 2014, according to estimates in a 2023 report published by the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The growth has prompted the CFPB to try to tighten regulation on the industry, leading the cash providers to fight back in a lawsuit against the regulator. Since the COVID-19 pandemic government financial aid dried up, some companies have sought capital from financiers that provided a lump sum, in exchange for a share of future revenues of the businesses, plus fees. To get repaid, the cash providers can make regular, including daily, withdrawals from businesses’ bank accounts. The popular financing comes at a cost. A 2019 Federal Reserve report said the equivalent annual percentage rates for cash advances can exceed 80% or “even rise to triple digits.” “We frequently see this…that in the last days before a bankruptcy filing, a company got in over its head with these merchant cash advances,” said Bankruptcy Judge Stacey Jernigan during a recent American Bankruptcy Institute event. “They very often seem to be the ones that caused the bankruptcy,” Judge Jernigan said, describing the financing as “pricey” or even “onerous.”

Petersen Health Care Inc., which runs around 100 nursing homes and assisted living facilities in the Midwest, is preparing to file for chapter 11 bankruptcy in the coming weeks, Bloomberg News reported. The Peoria, Ill.-based company has had more than a dozen of its locations put into receivership in recent weeks, according to court papers. In late January, a court ordered several of the company’s facilities to be put into receivership after lenders alleged that the company had defaulted on its debt. On Tuesday, two more of its facilities were put into receivership. Senior living companies have faced immense pressures since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Many struggle with persistent staff shortages and higher costs for labor, supplies and insurance, and inadequate government reimbursements.