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Endo International Plc filed for bankruptcy yesterday after reaching a $6 billion deal with some of its creditors, as the U.S. drugmaker seeks to settle thousands of lawsuits over its alleged role in the country's opioid epidemic, Reuters reported. The pharmaceutical company is the latest to file for chapter 11 to address opioid claims. Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, filed in September 2019, while Mallinckrodt Plc, a generic opioid manufacturer, recently emerged from bankruptcy. "By definitively addressing the more than $8 billion of debt that has burdened our balance sheet and establishing a pathway to closure with respect to the thousands of opioid-related and other lawsuits that the company has been defending at an unsustainable cost, we will be able to move forward...," Endo's Chief Executive Officer Blaise Coleman said in a statement. The company's chapter 11 bankruptcy filing in the Southern District of New York showed assets and liabilities in the range of $1 billion to $10 billion. The creditors, who will also assume some of the company's liabilities, will substantially control all of its assets, Endo said. The company also reached a deal with U.S. state attorneys general to provide $450 million over a period of 10 years, resolving allegations that the company boosted opioid sales using deceptive marketing, and bans the marketing of its opioids forever, according to the office of Massachusetts AG.

A Johnson & Johnson subsidiary urged a federal appeals court to uphold the controversial legal strategy it used to move to bankruptcy roughly 38,000 lawsuits linking its talc-based products to cancer, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. The subsidiary, LTL Management LLC, said in court papers filed on Monday that chapter 11 is the only option for compensating all claimants relatively quickly. LTL, which J&J created last year to move mass talc litigation to bankruptcy, laid-out a defense of its strategy in its filing in the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which is considering a request by injury claimants to have the subsidiary’s chapter 11 bankruptcy thrown out of court. The outcome of the appeal could dictate whether J&J’s restructuring strategy catches on more widely among companies facing costly litigation over allegedly dangerous or defective products. Appeals judges are expected to scrutinize a type of corporate restructuring in which companies facing mass litigation create a new subsidiary with minimal business operations and under Texas law assign it responsibility for tort liabilities before placing it in chapter 11.

Last week, David Tepper's GT Real Estate Holdings LLC took a major step toward potentially resolving its chapter 11 bankruptcy case and the Carolina Panthers headquarters saga in Rock Hill, N.C., the Charlotte Business Journal reported. The entity proposed a bankruptcy plan that would see contractors, creditors and local governments receive around $100 million. That plan is still subject to approval of the creditors and Delaware bankruptcy court, a process that could take months to sort out. Court documents show that a hearing for the bankruptcy plan approval process has been scheduled for Sept. 19. It is referred to as a "disclosure statement hearing" in the court filing. Andy Houston, a Charlotte bankruptcy attorney for Moon Wright & Houston, said that hearing is an initial step toward getting the full bankruptcy plan confirmed. Upon announcing its bankruptcy plan proposal last week, GT Real Estate said it was aiming for an October confirmation. The proposed plan calls for $60.5 million in cash to repay unsecured creditors, contractors and subcontractors from the Panthers project. It includes another $21.65 million to repay York County for its contributions to the project. The city of Rock Hill would receive $20 million or more from the sale of the 240-acre project site after accounting for senior claims and cleanup costs, GT Real Estate said.

A federal judge criticized 3M Co.’s attempt to use the protections of chapter 11 to resolve mass injury claims by U.S. military veterans, but will allow a bankruptcy court to decide whether to shield the company from ongoing litigation, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Judge M. Casey Rodgers in the U.S. District Court in Pensacola, Fla., declined on Sunday to prohibit 3M from contesting its full liability for injury claims alleging that earplugs manufactured by the company’s Aearo Technologies LLC unit were defective. Aearo filed for chapter 11 protection last month, shortly after assuming liability for roughly 230,000 pending claims against the business and its publicly traded parent company, 3M. Aearo wound up in dire financial straits after that voluntary assumption of liability, which put it on the hook for the largest multidistrict litigation in U.S. history, according to the judge’s ruling. Plaintiffs’ lawyers had requested that 3M be prohibited from contesting its full liability for the alleged earplug injuries, saying it was attempting to re-litigate that issue in bankruptcy court after proceeding in the tort litigation as if it alone bore responsibility. A 3M spokesman said the company’s court filings show the chapter 11 process “offers a more efficient, equitable, and expeditious means to resolve this litigation. Claimants determined to be entitled to compensation will be paid sooner, and 3M and Aearo will be able to better focus on making products people depend on.” In her ruling, Judge Rodgers said 3M’s move to unload injury liabilities onto Aearo was devised to escape the multidistrict litigation for good because 3M was “displeased with the rulings of this court” and several jury verdicts against the company. Judge Rodgers said that 3M had never indicated in more than three years of litigation “that any entity other than itself was responsible” for the service members’ claims. The judge said she was “deeply concerned” about 3M’s “sudden, bankruptcy eve about-face regarding the entity responsible,” but said it wasn’t her place to prohibit 3M from mounting such a potential defense.

Citigroup Inc. has sued Revlon Inc. in a bid to resolve a nagging legal question that emerged after the bank mistakenly wired $900 million to the cosmetics giant’s lenders and intensified after Revlon filed for bankruptcy, Bloomberg News reported. When Citi accidentally sent $900 million to Revlon lenders in August 2020 and later failed to get most of it back, the bank said it became a lender to Revlon, effectively stepping into the shoes of funds who refused to return about $500 million of the mistaken payment. But Revlon has since hinted that it may challenge Citi’s status as a creditor, prompting Citi to file suit in bankruptcy court Friday. Citi is asking Revlon’s bankruptcy judge to dispel any doubt about its right to repayment under the Revlon term loan. Because it had no obligation to pay down Revlon’s debt, denying the bank its rights as a creditor would let Revlon “escape liability for its own debt obligations,” lawyers for Citi wrote in the complaint. The bank was not aware that anyone would challenge its status as a creditor until days before the cosmetics company filed for Chapter 11 protection in June, according to court papers. It was then that Revlon and some of its creditors refused to acknowledge the bank’s rights as a secured lender in the company’s bankruptcy financing package.

The Boy Scouts of America removed a $250 million sex-abuse settlement with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from the youth group’s chapter 11 plan after a bankruptcy judge rejected the proposed terms, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. The Mormon Church has agreed to be treated as one of the many participating chartered organizations in the Boy Scouts’s chapter 11 bankruptcy, which would compensate roughly 82,200 claims of sexual abuse, according to an updated chapter 11 plan filed late Friday by the Boy Scouts. The Mormon institution will now be treated as any other troop sponsors that didn’t opt out of the chapter 11 plan and also didn’t settle with the Boy Scouts. The church will get legal protection for claims that occurred after 1976 because it was insured under Boy Scouts policies in that period, according to the Boy Scouts. The treatment of claims before 1976 would be less certain for the Mormon Church, which has a long history with the Boy Scouts. For one year after the youth group emerges from bankruptcy, the Mormon Church group can try to negotiate with a settlement trustee charged with overseeing victim compensation, according to the Boy Scouts. If no settlement is reached after a year, then abuse claims can be brought against the church.

A federal bankruptcy judge on Monday cleared the way for a defamation lawsuit in Connecticut to proceed against Infowars host and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, the Associated Press reported. The case was filed by relatives of some victims of the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. Jones has falsely claimed that the nation’s deadliest school shooting — which killed 20 students and six educators — was a hoax. Jones’ lawyer had sought to transfer the case to a federal bankruptcy court, rather than continue the case in Connecticut state court. That move brought the first day of jury selection to a sudden halt earlier this month. However, yesterday’s ruling by Judge Julie Manning essentially allows the plaintiffs to continue the defamation lawsuit against just Jones as an individual, without Free Speech Systems, a company owned by Jones and a defendant in the Connecticut case. “The plaintiffs’ rights to have that process continue in the Connecticut Superior Court should not be disturbed,” Manning wrote in the decision, adding that the plaintiffs’ claims for damages were ready for trial. Read more. 

In related news, “Infowars” host Alex Jones has transferred his $3 million Austin, Texas estate to his wife, Erika Wulff Jones, according to public property records, the New York Post reported. On August 5, the controversial conspiracy theorist was ordered by a Texas jury to pay more than $45 million to the parents of one of the victims of the 2012 school shooting that killed 20 children and six adults. The ruling came a day after Jones was also ordered to cough up $4.1 million in compensatory damages for claiming that the Newtown, Conn. school shooting was a hoax, designed to increase support for gun control. Andino Reynal, Jone’s lawyer, had requested the penalty be under $300,000. “You’ve already sent a message. A message for the first time to a talk show host, to all talk show hosts, that their standard of care has to change,” said Reynal. Jones had testified that any amount he owed over $2 million would “sink” Infowars’ parent company. However, a plaintiff-hired economist estimated Jones and his company were worth as much as $270 million, and that he withdrew $62 million for himself last year as he faced default judgments in lawsuits. Read more. 

The parent company of far-right website InfoWars received a U.S. bankruptcy judge's permission on Friday to make higher-than-expected payments to a vendor that ships InfoWars-branded dietary supplements and other products to customers, Reuters reported. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez in Houston approved a request by Free Speech Systems LLC, which is owned by conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, to pay its shipping and fulfillment vendor a flat $20 fee per order, exceeding a cap he had set on those payments on August 3, despite saying he had concerns about the "unique relationship" between the companies. FSS had told the court that it needed more flexibility to make higher shipping payments due to a "surge" in demand for its dietary supplements and other products. FSS filed for bankruptcy on July 29, in the middle of a trial to determine how much it and Jones should pay for making false and defamatory claims that the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school massacre was a hoax. A Texas jury later awarded nearly $50 million in compensatory and punitive damages to the parents of slain 6-year-old Jesse Lewis.