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Sam Bankman-Fried was hit with new criminal charges on Thursday, in an expanded indictment accusing the founder of the now-bankrupt FTX cryptocurrency exchange of conspiring to make more than 300 illegal political donations, Reuters reported, Reuters reported. Bankman-Fried now faces 12 criminal charges, including four for fraud and eight for conspiracy, up from eight charges in an earlier indictment, to which he has pleaded not guilty. Prosecutors have accused Bankman-Fried of stealing billions of dollars in FTX customer funds to plug losses at Alameda Research, his crypto-focused hedge fund. The new charges add to pressure on the 30-year-old former billionaire, who has seen two of his former top lieutenants plead guilty. Bankman-Fried is also trying to stay out of jail, after his online activity since his arrest prompted a federal judge to signal a willingness to revoke his $250 million bail package. His trial is slated for October.

The day-trading die hards who once rallied behind Bed Bath & Beyond Inc. appear to have abandoned the struggling retailer, Bloomberg News reported. A little more than two weeks after the company received a financial rescue to keep it out of bankruptcy, its shares have lost 74% of their value, falling in 11 of the past 12 days. That’s pushing them back toward the three-decade low hit in early January. That $225 million lifeline from a group led by hedge fund Hudson Bay Capital Management has promised to significantly increase the number of shares outstanding and was structured to allow the new investors to profit as long as the stock holds above 71.6 cents. Rather than spurring optimism about the company’s survival, the deal has has hit individual investors who once piled in when the stock traded above $20 — a far cry from Wednesday’s $1.62 close. It lost over 5% more soon after the market’s open Thursday.

The U.S. division of Australian coal producer Allegiance Coal Ltd. won court authorization Thursday to tap its lenders’ cash to avoid a shutdown of its mining operations, overcoming a disgruntled creditor skeptical of the company’s ability to turn its business around, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Judge Craig T. Goldblatt of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Del., approved Allegiance Coal USA Ltd.’s request to tap as much as $1.7 million in cash collateral to pay wages and other business expenses as the company starts chapter 11. An Allegiance lawyer said the money will “keep the lights on” and give the business time to chart a path forward. Judge Goldblatt granted the request from multiple Allegiance subsidiaries after executives testified that management could be forced to shut down its mines in Alabama and Colorado if it didn’t get access to the cash pledged to its lenders. Allegiance CEO Jonathan Romcke testified that the U.S. business was forced to file chapter 11 this week after a fund controlled by Collins St. Asset Management sent the company a notice of default on a roughly $30 million senior bond. Romcke said the U.S. subsidiaries are working to turn around the business and the company is moving forward with its plan to pivot away from thermal coal in favor of producing metallurgical coal. The U.S. mines previously produced metallurgical coal, which sells at a significantly higher price per metric ton than thermal coal, making the switch financially prudent, Romcke said.

More than a month after announcing it would be filing for bankruptcy, Window Select entered chapter 11 bankruptcy Feb. 17 against nearly 1,000 creditors, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported. North Carolina-based consulting firm Cogent Analytics, which has assumed management of the company, is still planning to fulfill contracts to more than 850 customers, according to a statement released by the company's communication team led by Mueller Communications. The decision to enter into chapter 11 bankruptcy comes after hundreds of customers claimed they'd been scammed after purchasing windows and doors that were never delivered. Over the past year, dozens of customers and contractors from across Wisconsin have filed suits against the company. Among the customers and vendors who are owed the largest amount of money are Illinois-based Climate Solutions Windows & Doors, who say Window Select owes them more than a million dollars for custom projects, according to the filing. Media companies iHeartMedia + Entertainment and Scripps Media, Inc. are both owed around $140,000; Sinclair Broadcast Group is owed about $12,000, according to the filing.

Things were already looking scary for investors of used-car retailer Carvana after a grim third-quarter earnings call in November. Then its stock fell 43% to $3.85 following reports in December that implied the company could be steering toward a restructuring, according to a em>Wall Street Journal commentary. It was reported in early December that Carvana was working with its legal counsel to evaluate restructuring options and that its creditors signed cooperation agreements to ensure they work in unison if the company attempts to raise new debt. Since that scare, though, Carvana’s stock had inexplicably gained 162% through Thursday’s close, alongside other meme-stock favorites. The company’s fourth-quarter results, released late Thursday, were even more frightening. Carvana said that its revenue fell 24% during the period compared with a year earlier. Its net loss widened to a record $1.4 billion, nearly eight times the net loss it saw a year earlier and a lot worse than the $426 million loss analysts polled by FactSet expected to see. Fourth-quarter cash burn (or negative free cash flow) of $800 million brought its 2022 total to roughly $1.8 billion — nearly its current market value. Guidance for the first quarter doesn’t look pretty, either. The company said it expects a sequential reduction in the number of cars sold in the current quarter as it tries to contain marketing costs and inventory size; Wall Street had been expecting it to increase. Carvana’s heavily shorted shares declined by a relatively mild 3.7% in after-hours trading following the earnings call.

Liquidators of bankrupt hedge fund Three Arrows Capital Ltd. said they will take steps to sell some of the firm’s nonfungible tokens as part of their recovery efforts, Bloomberg News reported. “The purpose of the sale is to realize the value of the NFTs for the purposes of the liquidation,” Christopher Farmer, senior managing director at advisory firm Teneo wrote in a notice on Wednesday. The steps will commence after March 23, the notice said. The document did not provide details of the NFTs up for sale, but clarified that these do not include the popular “Starry Night” Portfolio. The latter is an NFT-focused fund that was started by Three Arrows co-founders Su Zhu and Kyle Davies during the crypto craze in 2021. Three Arrows collapsed last year after a series of mistimed bets and soured crypto prices triggered margin calls. It previously managed around $4 billion in assets. Its founders have since been sparring with the court-appointed liquidators charged in June with unwinding their assets. The liquidators have alleged lack of cooperation from the founders and recently subpoenaed them via their Twitter handles.

Shares of Cineworld slumped as much as 22% on Wednesday after media reports said the world's second-largest cinema operator had received 40 non-binding bids, but none for its UK and U.S. assets or nearing its $6 billion secured debt load, Reuters reported. The reports cited company counsel Joshua Sussberg's comments to the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Houston on Tuesday, where he also said the initial bids received by a Feb. 16 deadline were all for the rest of Cineworld's global assets, mainly for theatres in central Europe, eastern Europe and Israel. In January, the company said that it would focus on a sale of the group as a whole rather than individual assets, months after the British cinema operator filed for U.S. bankruptcy protection in its bid to restructure debt and strengthen its balance sheet. The reports also said the company was proposing an April 10 deadline for final bids, with an auction, if necessary, to follow on April 17. A vote on restructuring has been set for May 21, with a court confirmation hearing tentatively set for May 30.

Lucira Health Inc., a publicly traded maker of at-home COVID-19 tests, filed for chapter 11 protection on Wednesday, Bloomberg News reported. California-based Lucira listed assets of about $146 million and liabilities of about $85 million in its bankruptcy petition. The company will keep operating during bankruptcy as it seeks to sell itself, according to a statement. Lucira sells an at-home COVID test that provides “lab-quality results” in 30 minutes, according to its website. A single test is listed for $35 on the site. Declining COVID-19 restrictions crimped demand for the tests, squeezing Lucira, Chief Executive Officer Erik Engelson said in the statement. Slower-than-expected regulatory approval for a flu test kit also hurt the company, he said. Venture capital firm Eclipse Ventures holds about a 10% stake in Lucira, making it the company’s biggest shareholder, court papers show.

Cerberus Capital Management LP said the bankruptcy filing of borrower Stanadyne LLC was “totally unnecessary” and surprising because an out-of-court restructuring was already in the works and chapter 11 costs will destroy value, WSJ Bankruptcy reported. The auto parts maker sought protection from creditors last week, saying it was “crippled” by the rising costs of $273 million of variable-rate debt owed to top creditor Cerberus after interest rates increased. During Stanadyne’s debut appearance Wednesday in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Del., Cerberus lawyer Laura Davis Jones said Stanadyne shouldn’t have filed for bankruptcy. “It took us by surprise,” she said, saying Cerberus was “a little misled.” Stanadyne faced no judgments or “liquidity wall,” nor was it in default at the time of the filing, Ms. Jones said. The company had basically agreed on a term sheet for an out-of-court restructuring, she said. Jones called the bankruptcy “value-destructive” because of the “significant fees” Stanadyne will incur in court. Judge John Dorsey asked Stanadyne representatives whether they wanted to respond. They declined, saying that it wasn’t the right time. Judge Dorsey weighed in, though. “At this point, I’ll say what my colleague Judge Shannon always says: ‘It is what it is, and we are where we are,’ so let’s just move forward,” Judge Dorsey said, referring to Judge Brendan Shannon. Stanadyne lawyer Kathryn Coleman said at the hearing that growth in the Jacksonville, N.C.-based company’s operating income couldn’t match the “explosion” in the company’s interest rates. Stanadyne intends to reorganize and will return to court seeking approval to hire an investment banker, she said.