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The U.S. unit of cryptocurrency exchange Binance has halted withdrawal of dollars by its clients from the platform, its updated terms showed on Monday, Reuters reported. In early June, Binance.US had halted dollar deposits, after the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) asked a court to freeze its assets. "In the event that customers wish to withdraw U.S. dollar funds from their account, they may do so by converting U.S. dollar funds to stablecoin or other digital assets, which can subsequently be withdrawn," the terms page said. The SEC had sued Binance, its CEO and founder Changpeng Zhao, and Binance.US's operation in June, alleging in 13 charges that Binance had engaged in a "web of deception," artificially inflated trading volumes and diverted customer funds.

Rite Aid appears to be pursuing a novel strategy to handle a huge number of opioid-related lawsuits by sidestepping plaintiffs until after filing for bankruptcy, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. The drugstore chain on Sunday became the first large company facing mass opioid liabilities to file chapter 11 without any agreement with opioid plaintiffs, who may end up getting very little from Rite Aid. Other companies facing opioid litigation, including drugmakers Purdue Pharma, Mallinckrodt, Endo and Insys Therapeutics, had all lined up settlements with at least some opioid plaintiffs before filing for bankruptcy. Rite Aid said that it intends to use bankruptcy to cut billions of dollars in financial debt and reduce its store count. It has a proposed deal with bondholders to hand them full equity control. The retailer said it also intends to address various litigation facing the company, including the more than 1,600 opioid lawsuits that have been a drain on its resources. “It’s unusual that there’s no explicit settlement with [opioid] victims, which was the case in most of the other opioid bankruptcy cases,” said Edward Neiger, a lawyer who has represented opioid plaintiffs in other chapter 11 proceedings. The Supreme Court is currently examining Purdue Pharma’s use of chapter 11 to resolve opioid lawsuits and bankruptcy courts’ practice of granting releases from liability for affiliates and other parties tied to a bankrupt company. If the Supreme Court rules against Purdue, the decision could outlaw third-party releases as a tool to forge settlements of opioid lawsuits and other mass torts. That possibility may give Rite Aid and other companies pause before reaching similar deals, Neiger said.

Another former member of Sam Bankman-Fried’s inner circle at FTX told a jury Monday that he committed crimes alongside the 31-year-old crypto entrepreneur, saying he was aware FTX customer money had been routed to Bankman-Fried’s crypto trading firm, YahooFinance.com reported. "I defrauded customers, investors," said Nishad Singh, the former director of engineering at the now-bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange, who first met Bankman-Fried while he was in high school. Singh pleaded guilty in February to wire fraud and conspiring to violate U.S. campaign finance laws. He is one of three close colleagues of Bankman-Fried to plead guilty and testify against the former FTX founder. The others — Caroline Ellison and Gary Wang — appeared during the first two weeks of the trial. Still another high-ranking FTX insider, software developer Adam Yedidia, testified against Bankman-Fried last week. Prosecutors are arguing that Bankman-Fried committed wire fraud and six other crimes by embezzling billions in FTX customer funds and lying to investors and lenders.

Bankruptcy Judge David R. Jones resigned from the bench while under a misconduct investigation by a federal appeals court over his failure to disclose his yearslong romantic relationship with a bankruptcy lawyer who had business before his court, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Judge Jones’s resignation from the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Houston comes after the appellate court that appointed him found probable cause that he committed misconduct by failing to disclose his romantic relationship with bankruptcy lawyer Elizabeth Freeman. Jones told the Wall Street Journal earlier this month that he and Freeman have been in a relationship for years and live together at a home in the Houston area. Neither Judge Jones nor Freeman had previously disclosed their relationship in court while Freeman worked on major corporate reorganizations that he oversaw. “I have always said that the bankruptcy process should be about the participants and the preservation of jobs,” Jones said on Sunday. “I have become a distraction to the good work that the court does. To end that distraction and hopefully return focus, I have resigned.” The bankruptcies that Freeman worked on and that Judge Jones oversaw included some of the largest chapter 11 cases of recent years, such as retailers JCPenney and Neiman Marcus and oil-and-gas driller Chesapeake Energy. In each of those cases and others, Freeman, then a partner at the Texas law firm Jackson Walker, billed hours along with her colleagues for their work representing the companies in bankruptcy, according to chapter 11 records. Judge Jones approved more than $1 million in legal fees billed by Freeman over 16 corporate bankruptcy cases from 2018 to 2021 when they shared an address. Judge Jones had said in a Friday court hearing that he would step down from overseeing large corporate reorganizations, though didn’t say at the time that he was resigning from the bench. Judge Jones faces an ethics investigation by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which appointed him to the bench in 2011. On Friday, the chief justice of the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals filed a complaint against Jones, finding that there was probable cause he had committed misconduct by failing to disclose his relationship with Freeman.

The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear a case in which an insurance company is challenging a bankruptcy reorganization plan that it says doesn’t protect it against fraudulent claims tied to asbestos exposure, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Truck Insurance Exchange is seeking to overturn a ruling by a U.S. appeals court that rejected the insurer’s challenge and allowed the bankruptcy reorganization plan of defunct cement maker Kaiser Gypsum to go forward. The insurer’s opposition centered on arguments that the Kaiser Gypsum bankruptcy plan would allow asbestos injury plaintiffs to pursue fraudulent claims against its policies. Insurance companies have made similar arguments in bankruptcy cases of the Boy Scouts of America and some Catholic dioceses involving sexual-abuse claims. Insurers have appealed the Boy Scouts of America’s bankruptcy settlement, and are challenging the plan put forward by the Diocese of Camden in New Jersey over similar issues.

Rite Aid filed for bankruptcy on Sunday in New Jersey, unable to find the money to settle hundreds of federal, state and private lawsuits alleging it oversupplied prescription painkillers, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. The filing puts all those suits on hold. As part of the restructuring, the company will close more of its 2,100 stores and name a new chief executive. Its collapse imperils some of the roughly 47,000 jobs at the company, which just celebrated its 61st anniversary. Lenders will provide the company with about $200 million in new financing as part of a plan to restructure more than $3 billion of existing debt in chapter 11. MedImpact, a pharmacy benefit management firm, has offered to buy Rite Aid’s Elixir segment for $575 million, though an auction will be held to see if Rite Aid can find a higher bid. Jeffrey Stein, head of a financial advisory firm, will take over as Rite Aid’s chief executive. The drugstore chain’s current interim CEO Elizabeth Burr will remain on the board. The company faces a Justice Department complaint that Rite Aid pharmacists filled opioid prescriptions despite clear “red flags.” The DOJ alleged that Rite Aid ignored evidence that its stores were dispensing unlawful prescriptions, deleted internal notes about suspicious prescriptions and directed managers to tell pharmacists “to be mindful of everything that is put in writing.” Rite Aid has denied the allegations.

The co-founder and former chief executive officer of Voyager Digital Ltd. broke derivatives rules while at the helm of the crypto lender, leading to its bankruptcy and $1.7 billion in customer losses, U.S. regulators alleged yesterday, Bloomberg News reported. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed a lawsuit against Stephen Ehrlich in US federal court in New York, claiming he and Voyager “fraudulently solicited participation in and operated a digital asset trading and custody platform.” The agency accused the firm of luring customers with promises of returns as high as 12% on certain crypto holdings and making misleading statements about the platform’s safety. Through those enticements, Voyager facilitated billions of dollars worth of transactions involving digital assets that were commodities, including Bitcoin and Circle’s USD Coin, according to the CFTC. Voyager was one of the dominoes to fall in 2022’s crypto chaos. The industry is still reeling from the tumult, which culminated in the collapse of crypto trading giant FTX. The criminal trial of FTX’s co-founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, began last week in New York.

Major League Baseball on Wednesday pushed a bankrupt sports broadcaster to cancel or clearly commit to five teams' TV broadcast contracts, saying the teams can't plan for the 2024 season without clarity on their TV contracts, Reuters reported. MLB asked a U.S. bankruptcy judge in Houston, Texas to force Diamond Sports Group to make a clear decision on whether it will broadcast 2024 games for the Atlanta Braves, Cleveland Guardians, Detroit Tigers, Milwaukee Brewers and Texas Rangers. MLB asked the court to compel a contract decision late Wednesday, along with a separate filing opposing Diamond's request for more time to file a restructuring plan with the court. MLB warned that the league could find itself scrambling to broadcast games for multiple teams next year, as it did this year for the Arizona Diamondbacks and San Diego Padres. "At the moment, MLB and the Clubs can only guess which Clubs the Debtors may continue to support and which may be left without a telecast partner," MLB said.

The Boy Scouts of America has turned over a trove of records that survivors of sexual abuse and their lawyers have long sought from the youth group, which emerged earlier this year from bankruptcy with a plan to pay roughly $2.4 billion to resolve more than 82,000 individual abuse claims, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. The youth group last week provided the majority of the more than 7,766 records regarding so-called ineligible volunteers, maintained to keep sexual abusers out of its ranks, to a settlement trust that helps distribute payments to survivors. Most of the files haven’t previously been made available to claimants and their lawyers. “There are over 6,300 new ineligible volunteer files that I just got access to,” said Chris Hurley, a member of the settlement trustee’s advisory committee and a lawyer for sexual-abuse survivors associated with the Boy Scouts. Access to the records could strengthen victims’ cases against alleged perpetrators and help survivors decide whether to pursue independent reviews of their claims, which would cost them $20,000 each but potentially result in more compensation than other settlement options.