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The three largest U.S. drug distributors, who are accused of helping fuel the opioid crisis that has resulted in nearly 500,000 overdose deaths in the U.S., will defend themselves in a trial that kicks off today, Reuters reported. The trial against AmerisourceBergen Corp., McKesson Corp. and Cardinal Health Inc. in Charleston, West Virginia, involves a lawsuit seeking more than $1 billion brought by the city of Huntington and Cabell County. They claim that the companies ignored red flags that opioids were being diverted to illegal channels, flooding the state with hundreds of millions of highly addictive pills. The distributors have denied the claims, arguing they cannot be liable for distributing pills that were prescribed by doctors. Huntington and Cabell, along with other West Virginia towns and counties, opted out of a proposed $26 billion nationwide settlement with the three distributors and drugmaker Johnson & Johnson. A verdict in the trial could help lay the groundwork for settlements in the sprawling nationwide litigation over the opioid crisis, which encompasses more than 3,300 lawsuits by local governments around the country against opioid manufacturers, distributors and pharmacies. Read more. 

In related news, the Sackler family who own Purdue Pharma, the maker of Oxycontin, have for months tried to portray their bid for immunity from future opioid lawsuits as a kind of fait accompli, a take-it-or-leave it fix to a legal morass. In exchange for what amounts to a legal firewall for the Sacklers and their remaining empire, members of the family have offered to forfeit control of their bankrupt drug company and pay $4.2 billion from their private fortunes. Judge Robert Drain who is presiding over the case in White Plains, N.Y., has suggested such a deal may be desirable and achievable along these broad lines. A negotiated settlement could preempt years of costly litigation — the Sacklers deny any wrongdoing — and might accelerate financial aid to communities struggling to recover from an opioid epidemic that has already cost more than 450,000 lives. But a growing group of public officials and activists are mounting a last-ditch effort to derail the plan, describing it in legal briefs as an unethical, and possibly unlawful, use of the bankruptcy court's power, NPR reported. Late last week, 25 state attorneys general filed a new brief describing the proposed settlement as "unprecedented," "unjust" and "unconfirmable as a matter of law." "The bankruptcy system should not be allowed to shield non-bankrupt billionaires," said Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey. "It would set a terrible precedent. If the Sacklers are allowed to use bankruptcy to escape the consequences of their actions, it would be a roadmap for other powerful bad actors." State AGs aren't alone in objecting to the deal. In recent weeks, attorneys representing local and state governments, native tribes and opioid activists filed briefs raising legal and ethical concerns about the plan. A division of the Justice Department that oversees bankruptcy cases also filed a brief questioning whether the bankruptcy court has the "authority and jurisdiction" to approve such a plan. Read more. 

Texans left in the dark during February’s winter storm blackout now risk being frozen out from claiming damages from Brazos Electric Power Cooperative Inc. and Griddy Energy LLC as the bankrupt power companies rush to shield themselves against potential claims for property damage and wrongful death, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. The Houston judge overseeing Brazos’s bankruptcy proceedings said Thursday the cooperative only needs to place notices in newspapers and a magazine to alert Texans about the requirement that they file claims to seek compensation over the deadly February storm. Under the judge’s ruling, those published notices about the Brazos chapter 11 case are enough to alert potential claimants that their rights are at risk and failure to respond by the August deadline would strip them of their chance to collect damages from Brazos. Among the claimants in the Brazos bankruptcy is Larry Ford, son of Elzie D. Ford, a 68-year-old man who was found frostbitten and unresponsive in his home five days after losing power and heat in below-freezing temperatures, according to court papers filed by the younger Mr. Ford. He died in a Waco, Texas, hospital on Feb. 20. Mr. Ford filed a claim against Brazos and sued others including HILCO Electric Cooperative Inc., one of the member cooperatives that collectively own Brazos, alleging negligence when the power was cut to his father’s house. The Texas Department of State Health Services is still tallying the fatalities but has identified 151 deaths related to Winter Storm Uri as of Wednesday. Some Texans are continuing to repair homes damaged by burst pipes. “They shouldn’t wake up and find out” their legal rights against Brazos were washed away just months into its bankruptcy, said Thomas Mayer, lead lawyer for the unsecured creditors committee, during a hearing on Thursday in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Houston. The committee wanted a broader noticing program to reach out to potential claimants, saying that Brazos could easily alert its 1.5 million customers directly by text messages, emails and direct mailing of the deadline to file claims. Brazos said the customer lists belong to its member cooperatives, which have refused to hand over the information. Mr. Mayer said customers who try to sue member cooperatives for personal injury or property damage will be met with the argument that any negligence was Brazos’s fault. By that time, the deadline to file claims against Brazos may have passed.

Delphi salaried retirees are down to their last legal shot in their more than 11-year battle to restore pensions lost when the auto parts maker went bankrupt, the Warren (Mich.) Tribune Chronicle reported. “Our only legal option is to ask for cert (certiorari) at the (U.S.) Supreme Court so that we could get the Supreme Court to hear our case…. We still have until the end of July, I believe, around the end of July to do that. So we’re working on what we are going to do right now,” Chuck Cunningham, legal liaison for the Delphi Salaried Retirees Association, said. But the odds are long for that happening given, according to a U.S. judicial website, just 100 to 150 of the more than 7,000 cases the court is asked to review each year are accepted. The latest blow dealt to the association was at the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals. The court rejected a request to review a decision it made in September that sided with a March 2019 decision by a Michigan federal court judge. That judge dismissed the group’s lawsuit over lost retirement funding against the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. The court concluded the “issues raised in the petition were fully considered upon the original submission and decision of the case,” a ruling states.

More than 700 properties or land parcels tied to the Roman Catholic Church of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe are expected to be up for auction in July as part of an ongoing bankruptcy case, Albuquerque Business First reported. The sales are necessary because of a December 2018, chapter 11 reorganization bankruptcy stemming from child sexual abuse claims filed against the Archdiocese. The claims led to nearly 300 settlements, according to the Albuquerque Journal. The list of 732 properties likely won't be all sold individually. Most are parcels of vacant land scattered across 20 New Mexico counties. The properties include five acres of vacant, non-residential land in the Paradise Hills subdivision on Albuquerque's Westside. Several parcels of land are available as well in Sandoval County throughout the Rio Rancho Estates subdivision.

Hedge fund Alden Global Capital likely violated federal pension protections by putting $294 million of its newspaper employees’ pension savings into its own funds, according to a Labor Department investigation, the Washington Post reported. Alden is presently the leading bidder for Tribune Publishing’s titles, including the Chicago Tribune and Baltimore Sun. It has already purchased at least 200 newspapers, often aggressively cutting staff and selling off the papers’ assets to boost profits. Alden also took advantage of their newspaper employees’ pension savings, according to a 2019 decision by the Labor Department. Among the agency’s findings was that the three administrators governing pensions for current and former employees of the Denver Post and other Alden-controlled newspapers were affiliated with Alden or its media company, MediaNews Group. Acting as fiduciaries of the pensions, the three administrators moved hundreds of millions of dollars of the employees’ savings into two Alden-controlled funds between 2013 and 2015, according to the decision. Federal law protecting pension holders, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), requires that pensions be invested solely on behalf of retirees and not in a way that could benefit the pension managers themselves.

With its ill-equipped natural gas systems crippled by the cold, Texas’s exports across the Rio Grande froze up and 4.7 million customers in northern Mexico went without electricity — more than in Texas itself, the Washington Post reported. The spot price of gas jumped 30-fold as far west as Southern California. And all the way up by the Canadian border, gas utilities in Minnesota that turned to the daily spot market to meet demand say they had to pay about $800 million more than planned over the course of just five days as the Texas freeze-up pinched off supplies. “The ineptness and disregard for common-sense utility regulation in Texas makes my blood boil and keeps me up at night,” Katie Sieben, chairwoman of the Minnesota Public Utility Commission, said in an interview. “It is maddening and outrageous and completely inexcusable that Texas’s lack of sound utility regulation is having this impact on the rest of the country.” The Texas market is so large — second only to California’s — and its natural gas industry is so predominant that when things go wrong there, the impacts can be felt across the country. Minnesota’s biggest gas companies are putting forward plans to recoup their expenses by adding a surcharge to customers’ bills, which the state utility commission would first have to approve. Normally, such adjustments to account for winter prices go into effect in September, but Minnesota’s biggest gas utility, Houston-based CenterPoint Energy, says the financial pinch is so great it wants to start billing customers next month — and charging them nearly 9 percent interest until the extraordinary costs are paid off.

A National Rifle Association board member said Wednesday that appointing a receiver to take charge of the organization — a tactic the NRA worried New York authorities would pursue before it filed bankruptcy — would spell the end of the 150-year-old gun rights group, the Wall Street Journal reported. “It would be disastrous,” board member retired Lt. Col. Willes Lee testified during the third week of trial over the organization’s January bankruptcy filing and allegations of spending abuses by management brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James. The NRA has said that it filed bankruptcy to prevent New York from putting the group into receivership. Ms. James sued to dissolve the NRA in August and is now 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. Lt. Col. Lee’s testimony kicked-off the NRA’s defense of chief executive Wayne LaPierre and his decision to file the chapter 11 in January. Lt. Col. Lee and fellow board member Tom King on Wednesday praised Mr. LaPierre’s character and his leadership. The NRA has argued Mr. LaPierre is critical to the group’s survival. The NRA is seeking to keep control of its chapter 11 case so it can propose a reorganization plan and defeat a bid by New York authorities and its former ad agency Ackerman McQueen Inc. to wrest control of the bankruptcy from NRA management via a trustee. The NRA board will consider approving a reorganization plan at a meeting scheduled for May 1, Mr. Lee said. The group has been a New York registered not-for profit since 1871.