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Bishop of Buffalo Michael William Fisher announced, in conjunction with the Movement to Restore Trust, how the diocese will be looking to help move the clergy forward following years of sexual abuse cases. Those cases lead to the declaration of bankruptcy last February, WKBW.com reported. "There are issues that we need to confront in the days and weeks ahead and that is something that I cannot do alone," Bishop Fisher said. The Bishop says those issues will be confronted through new initiatives. The diocese will group parishes together in "families" looking to increase participation and changing the way Catholic education is done. What was not address, was how the diocese will assure the clergy that the sexual abuse and resulting cover ups will never happen again. "They spent all of this time trying to establish a road to renewal and to build trust when they still haven't done anything to address the problem that put them in this very place," Kevin Koscielniak, founder of Buffalo Survivors Group, said.

Small groups of former Boy Scouts who say they were sexually abused by Scouting leaders are seeking more information about how much money local councils and insurers will be contributing to settle decades worth of sex abuse claims as part of the Boy Scouts of America’s reorganization, Reuters reported. The former Scouts filed a series of objections on Wednesday and Thursday in Delaware bankruptcy court to the organization's disclosure materials for its proposed reorganization plan. It includes a proposed settlement of more than 80,000 sex abuse claims filed against the Boy Scouts. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Laurie Selber Silverstein will consider the disclosure materials at a hearing on May 19. If she approves them, the Boy Scouts will be able to send them to creditors who are entitled to vote on the proposed plan. The plan would set up a trust to be funded by a mix of cash, artwork, insurance policies, and at least $425 million from local councils in exchange for releases against legal actions stemming from sex abuse allegations. The organization’s proposal has already been met with opposition from groups representing the interests of abuse survivors in the bankruptcy, including an official tort claimants' committee and a group called the Coalition of Abused Scouts for Justice. This week, law firms representing small groups of individual abuse claimants filed papers saying that the disclosure materials need to include valuations of each local council’s assets, how many sex abuse claims have been lodged against each local council, and how much each council is contributing to the settlement trust in exchange for a release of abuse claims. The claimant groups say the information is necessary for them to determine whether the contributions are worth giving up their claims against their local councils.

Massachusetts sued a unit of French advertising company Publicis Groupe SA on Thursday, accusing it of fueling the U.S. opioid epidemic by using unfair and deceptive marketing to help the drugmaker Purdue Pharma sell more OxyContin, Reuters reported. The state’s attorney general, Maura Healey, accused Publicis Health of working with drugmakers from 2010 to 2019 on campaigns to persuade doctors to prescribe more opioids for longer periods of time, including to patients who did not need them. She said Publicis collected more than $50 million from Purdue alone, including for efforts to “humanize” opioids and make doctors prescribe them to a wider pool of patients. Publicis Health did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The lawsuit filed in a state court in Boston seeks civil penalties, restitution to victims and a declaration that the unit created a public nuisance. Healey’s lawsuit followed agreements this year by the consulting firm McKinsey & Co to pay $641 million to resolve lawsuits by all 50 U.S. states, Washington, D.C., and five U.S. territories over its role in the epidemic. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has said nearly 500,000 people died from opioid overdoses from 1999 to 2019. Purdue is operating in bankruptcy. In March, it proposed a restructuring plan that would steer profits to opioid victims and require members of the Sackler family who own the company to contribute nearly $4.3 billion.

Texas lawmakers are debating several bills to address how to cover the huge charges facing some energy companies for power purchased during February’s winter storm, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Legislation that has advanced the farthest, according to lawyers and executives following the process, would specifically address the bills owed by power cooperatives, allowing them to raise financing on their own and charge their customers to service the securitization debt. Other legislative efforts aim to go further by holding more market participants throughout Texas responsible for the outstanding bills owed to the state’s grid operator, Electric Reliability Council of Texas. Those two areas of legislation may be combined, as they both address money owed to Ercot. A third legislative track aims to address $16 billion of charges for power purchases made during the storm, that an independent market monitor identified as resulting from a mistake by Ercot and state regulators. That bill faced the most opposition during a hearing in the statehouse this week because it spreads greater costs among more participants in the Texas market. Moreover, a debate continues about whether Ercot is required to reverse those charges.

Bankruptcy administrators for defunct retailer Toys “R” Us Inc. are trying to put its former top leaders on trial before a jury over the millions of dollars in bonuses they pocketed days before the company’s plunge into bankruptcy, the Wall Street Journal reported. The proposed jury trial concerns the practice of corporate executives collecting bonuses shortly before their businesses file for bankruptcy, leaving debts unpaid and employees at risk. While the Toys “R” Us bonus payments occurred in 2017, a range of businesses paid similar bonuses during the COVID-19 pandemic as they teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. Companies including rental-car giant Hertz Global Holdings Inc., department store chain J.C. Penney Co. and oil-and-gas driller Chesapeake Energy Corp. all dispensed bonuses shortly before they filed for bankruptcy last year as COVID-19 upended the U.S. economy. The stated rationale for the bonuses was retention — to persuade top executives to stick in their jobs despite their employers’ troubles. By paying bonuses before bankruptcy, the companies got around legal restrictions on such “stay pay,” which kick in once a business files for chapter 11. Creditors largely grumbled in private, but few took action in bankruptcy court to try to get the money back. Now, however, the practice is being hotly disputed in the aftermath of the 2017 bankruptcy of Toys “R” Us — one of the few times the legality of retention bonuses has been seriously tested in bankruptcy court. Although the company’s once-mighty fleet of toy stores is long gone, a bankruptcy trust set up to scrounge up money for unpaid suppliers is still around, as a vehicle for litigation.

Archegos Capital is preparing for insolvency, triggered by banks’ attempts to recoup some of the $10bn they lost on its soured bets in March, the Financial Times reported. The family office run by Bill Hwang has hired restructuring advisers to assess potential legal claims from banks and to plan for a possible winding down of its operations. Six banks that acted as prime brokers to Archegos — Credit Suisse, Nomura, Morgan Stanley, UBS, MUFG and Mizuho — lost more than $10bn when they were forced to liquidate the family office’s positions in US-listed companies such as ViacomCBS after it failed to meet margin calls. A number of them are preparing to issue “letters of demand” to the firm — a request for payment ahead of launching a legal claim. They first want to finish closing out the Archegos positions; last week Credit Suisse said it had sold 97 per cent of the related securities. Lenders are also investigating whether Hwang’s family office withheld or provided incorrect information about the scale of its borrowing from other prime brokers.

Shock waves from the deep freeze that swept Texas in February continue to reverberate through the energy industry, threatening a stake in a Texas wind farm held by funds managed by investment firm BlackRock Inc., WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. A New York judge heard arguments yesterday in a dispute between BlackRock-controlled Mariah Del Norte LLC, a wind venture knocked offline during the February storm, and Citigroup Inc., which billed nearly $100 million on an electricity hedge. That amount represents Citi’s costs for buying electricity to cover the power Mariah failed to deliver, according to court papers. At a hearing yesterday in the Supreme Court of New York County, Judge Robert Reed said he would hear evidence at a trial to be scheduled soon on Mariah’s request to prohibit Citi from taking action after it called a default over the wind farm’s failure to pay. Many wind farms in Texas, to get construction financing, enter into long-term hedged contracts with financial institutions in which the operator agrees to provide a steady stream of electricity to the counterparty. In return, the financial institution, often a Wall Street bank, generally agrees to pay a set price for the electricity. If the operator can’t deliver, it agrees to pay to purchase electricity on the wholesale market, or agrees to pay the bank to purchase power itself. Mariah has said it needs protection from Citi and the risk that the bank could seize the wind farm’s equity interests and force an asset sale to cover the nearly $100 million debt.

A Justice Department lawyer said that National Rifle Association leader Wayne LaPierre has failed to provide adequate oversight of the gun-rights organization and that management should be removed or curtailed if a bankruptcy judge allows the NRA to remain in chapter 11, the Wall Street Journal reported. The government lawyer’s criticism of NRA management came at the conclusion of a monthlong trial over the bankruptcy, supporting New York Attorney General Letitia James’s argument that LaPierre put the NRA into chapter 11 to try to evade accountability for spending abuses, which he and the NRA have denied. James sued to dissolve the NRA in August and is seeking to either have the chapter 11 case thrown out or to bring in an independent trustee to take charge of the NRA in bankruptcy. The trial concluded yesterday with closing arguments in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Dallas that outlined vastly different visions on what should happen to the 150-year-old group. New York and federal authorities as well as the NRA’s former ad agency contend the not-for-profit is badly mismanaged and an independent fiduciary is needed to rein in Mr. LaPierre. The NRA, meanwhile, said LaPierre and his prodigious fundraising are its most valuable asset, that its board is independent and that it has a plan to bolster its corporate governance and restructure its affairs through chapter 11, setting up operations in what it says is the friendlier jurisdiction of Texas. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Harlin Hale now will decide which path the NRA will take and said yesterday that it is one of the most important cases he will rule on during his judicial career. Judge Hale said he intends to retire next year. Assistant U.S. Trustee Lisa Lambert, part of the Justice Department unit overseeing the nation’s bankruptcy courts, said that NRA management hasn’t been accountable for lavish spending and financial irregularities that date back years before its January bankruptcy filing and persisted even during the chapter 11 case.