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Mallinckrodt Gets Extension on $200 Million Opioid Payment Deadline

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Mallinckrodt Plc struck a deal to delay a $200 million opioid settlement payment originally due Friday as it continues evaluating options to restructure its balance sheet, Bloomberg News reported. The company got an extension to June 23 from representatives of the opioid trust administering settlement proceeds, according to a Friday regulatory filing. Mallinckrodt said it is continuing to evaluate its capital needs given its obligations under the opioid settlement and its long-term debt. Mallinckrodt is negotiating a 30-day waiver with its secured lenders to avoid a default tied to skipping the settlement payment, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the negotiations are private. The company and some of its lenders are discussing a potential restructuring of its settlement obligations, they added. The company agreed to a $1.7 billion opioid settlement as part of its exit from bankruptcy last year. Since then, its sales have missed projects, tipping the company back into financial distress. The payment due Friday was scheduled to be its second after an initial $450 million contribution last year. Mallinckrodt had been negotiating with lenders about its options ahead of the payment, with some of them urging the company to skip or delay the payment as it looks to renegotiate the settlement. The company has said it’s considering options including a second chapter 11 filing to address its financial woes and “there can be no assurance of the outcome of this process.”

Liquidators of Crypto Fund Three Arrows Seek to Fine Co-Founder $10,000 Per Day

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Liquidators of Three Arrows Capital want a judge to fine co-founder Kyle Davies $10,000 per day, claiming their ability to unwind the failed cryptocurrency hedge fund has been impeded by his refusal to cooperate with their investigation into the firm’s collapse, Bloomberg News reported. The substantial fine is warranted because Davies hasn’t responded to a subpoena served nearly 5 months ago, lawyers for the 3AC liquidators said in a filing in New York bankruptcy court earlier this week. The decision to impose the fine is up to Judge Martin Glenn who said in a ruling earlier this year that Davies risked being held in contempt of court if he failed to comply with the subpoena and continued to sit out the proceedings. Liquidators have taken unorthodox steps in an effort to get the 3AC co-founders to turn over information, including getting approval from Glenn to issue the subpoena to Davies via Twitter, where he frequently posts. Given the circumstances, a $10,000-per-day fine “is fair and likely meaningful in persuading Davies to respond,” the liquidators said. The liquidators have said they don’t know where Davies or fellow co-founder Su Zhu are currently residing. However, they referenced a June 9 New York Times article that reported Davies flew to Bali after 3AC collapsed. In a sworn statement, 3AC liquidator Russell Crumpler cited Davies’ comments in the article as evidence that the founder has shown no remorse for the collapse of the firm, which owes creditors roughly $3 billion.

Frac Sand Mining Business and Quarry Lands in San Antonio Bankruptcy Court

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Proppant Tech Services LLC began producing frac sand — used for hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to drill in rock — to sell to oil and gas companies or other sand processors in August at a 179-acre sand quarry in south Bexar County, Texas, the San Antonio Express-News reported. The company generated $6 million in revenue in its first six months. However, loans totaling about $8.8 million to Proppant and landowner NA Land Investments LLC ended up in default. The lender, Amarillo National Bank, last month notified the borrowers that it would foreclose on the collateral. The companies’ owners — Anirban “Bon” Haldar, Murray Moran and Ignacio Martinez — had made individual guarantees that the loans would be repaid. Each owns a third of both companies. To avoid losing the assets in foreclosure, Martinez acquired the debt from the bank through his company I.M.Investments LLC. He also owns IPE Aggregate LLC, a New Braunfels-based industrial equipment supplier that provided some of the equipment for Proppant’s operations. He wasn’t acting as a white knight for his partners, however, as he subsequently demanded that they relinquish the collateral and cease all operations and control of Proppant. I.M. Investments even posted the land for next month’s foreclosure auction. Haldar and Moran ignored the request, so I.M. Investments last week sued them in state District Court in San Antonio and obtained a temporary restraining order that bars them operating Proppant. They responded by putting Proppant and NA Land into bankruptcy on June 11.

Mallinckrodt Seeks Relief From Opioid Settlement Payment

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Drugmaker Mallinckrodt is seeking to postpone or not pay in full the $200 million payment due today to an opioid-victims compensation trust, according to people familiar with the company’s planning, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Mallinckrodt has indicated that it might not make the opioid payment and is in discussions with financial creditors to seek waivers from potential defaults arising from nonpayment, the people said. Friday’s scheduled payment is Mallinckrodt’s second under a $1.7 billion settlement with state and local governments and private plaintiffs who alleged that it played a role in fueling the opioid crisis. The drugmaker has struggled since exiting chapter 11 last year and is now considering a repeat bankruptcy filing to revamp its balance sheet a second time. Mallinckrodt owes $1.25 billion of remaining payments under the opioid plan, which included liability releases for the company and its executives. No final decision on Friday’s payment has been made. Earlier Thursday, the company said in a securities filing it has decided not to pay $56 million in interest payments owed to its secured bondholders. It said it continues to engage with creditors on restructuring proposals they submitted that could be completed in or out of bankruptcy court.

Crypto Lender Abra Is Insolvent, Made Transfers to Binance, State Regulators Say

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Crypto lender Abra has been insolvent or nearly insolvent since the end of March, Texas regulators said yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported. In an emergency cease and desist order, the Texas State Securities Board alleged that Abra, its related entities and founder William John “Bill” Barhydt committed securities fraud. Abra offered and sold investments in its yield programs Abra Earn and Abra Boost that contained “statements that are materially misleading or otherwise likely to deceive the public,” the regulator said. The Silicon Valley-based company also secretly transferred assets to Binance.com—an exchange banned for Americans—and had assets valued at about $119 million with the global crypto exchange as of February, according to the complaint. As of February, the complaint said, Abra had more than $12 million stuck at collapsed crypto exchange FTX. It also made tens of millions of dollars of bad loans to several crypto companies that failed last year, including nearly $30 million to Babel Finance, $30 million to Genesis and $10 million to Three Arrows Capital. (Subscription required.)

Bittrex Withdrawals Set to Resume After Bankruptcy Court Gives Green Light

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Cryptocurrency trading platform Bittrex is expected to resume customer withdrawals on June 15 following an order from a judge in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware, Cointelegraph.com reported. The decision does not settle the question of the subordination of U.S. government claims, which had led to objections against its plan. “Objections (if any) to the Motion having been withdrawn, resolved or overruled on the merits,” Judge Brendan Shannon’s June 13 order read. It went on to stipulate that nothing in the motion or the order constituted a finding on whether crypto assets or transactions with them are securities. The order also specified that it does not determine the priority of creditors or prohibit the U.S. from clawing back assets from customers if it is not paid in full. Bittrex’s largest creditor is the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), to which it owes $24 million.

Oklahoma’s Schusterman Family Beats Back Samson Bankruptcy Lawsuit

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Members of Oklahoma’s billionaire Schusterman family have beaten back a lawsuit alleging that their $7.2 billion sale of Samson Resources to a KKR-led private equity consortium unfairly enriched them to the detriment of the oil-and-gas company’s creditors in bankruptcy, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. A trustee pursuing recoveries for creditors in Samson’s bankruptcy had sued the former owners in 2017, saying the buyers paid twice the company’s fair market value in a 2011 deal. The trustee had alleged that the deal burdened Samson with more debt than it could handle, leading to its bankruptcy in 2015. In a ruling Wednesday, Judge Brendan Shannon in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Del., said the trustee failed to make its case that the subsequent owners overpaid. “The gold standard for determining the value of an asset is to sell it in an open and fair market,” the judge said. “A thing is worth what a willing buyer will pay to a willing seller following a proper marketing process” at arms’ length, with both having reasonable knowledge of relevant facts. Opinions of valuation experts, such as the one that the Samson trustee used, are less reliable than negotiations in determining the fair market value of an asset, he said. Samson took on more than $3 billion in debt as part of the buyout and struggled afterward as oil and gas prices fell.

Prosecutors Agree to Withdraw New Charges Against Sam Bankman-Fried

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Federal prosecutors investigating the collapse of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange said late Wednesday that, at least for now, they would withdraw several of the charges facing the company’s founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, the New York Times reported. In a court filing, the prosecutors said they would proceed to a trial in October without pursuing five of the 13 charges against Mr. Bankman-Fried — a set of accusations that the government added to the crypto mogul’s indictment in the months after he was extradited from the Bahamas in December. Among those charges was a bank fraud count, as well as an allegation that Mr. Bankman-Fried bribed a foreign government. The withdrawal of those counts was a victory for Mr. Bankman-Fried, who has argued that prosecutors should not have been allowed to charge him with additional crimes after his extradition. But the win came with a major caveat: The prosecutors asked the judge overseeing the case, Lewis A. Kaplan of Federal District Court in Manhattan, to schedule a second trial in early 2024 on those five counts. The prosecutors said that the delay was a procedural necessity. This week, Mr. Bankman-Fried won a ruling in the Bahamas, where FTX was based, granting him the ability to argue in court there that the Bahamian government should not consent to the additional charges. That legal dispute could take months to unfold.

Sam Bankman-Fried Challenges Post-Extradition Charges in Bahamas Court

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Sam Bankman-Fried, the indicted founder of bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX, wants a U.S. judge to throw out criminal charges brought against him following his extradition from the Bahamas, Reuters reported. In papers filed late Monday in Manhattan federal court, lawyers for the former billionaire said they asked Bahamas' Supreme Court to bar the country's government from authorizing U.S. prosecutors to move forward on the five charges, until their client has a chance to be heard. The lawyers said that a sixth charge, for violating U.S. campaign finance laws, should also be dismissed even though it was brought before his extradition, because the Bahamas did not consent to it. They want U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan to dismiss the charges, or try them separately from seven additional charges at Bankman-Fried's scheduled Oct. 2 trial. FTX was based in the Caribbean country. "To proceed otherwise would cause significant prejudice to Mr. Bankman-Fried and should not be permitted," his lawyers wrote on Monday. Bankman-Fried, 31, was extradited in December from the Bahamas to face charges he stole from customers, lied to investors and lenders, and violated campaign finance laws. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan later accused him of bank fraud and bribing Chinese officials.