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Deutsche Bank AG agreed to settle a lawsuit in which it accused a pair of offshore feeder funds of wrongfully backing out of a deal to sell the German lender $1.6 billion in claims against Bernard Madoff’s bankrupt investment advisory business, Bloomberg News reported. Lawyers for Deutsche Bank and the funds — Kingate Global Fund Ltd. and Kingate Euro Fund Ltd — filed a joint letter Thursday in federal court in Manhattan saying they’d struck a deal but didn’t disclose any terms. The Kingate funds, which funneled client money to Madoff’s firm for years before his Ponzi scheme collapsed in 2008, had agreed to sell the claims to Deutsche Bank Securities Inc. for 66 cents on the dollar in 2011, according to the lawsuit filed in 2019. Deutsche Bank claimed the funds got “sellers’ remorse” because the value of the claims had grown since they struck their purported deal. The suit was heading toward a trial after U.S. District Judge Edgardo Ramos in March 2021 denied the funds’ motion to dismiss the case.

Johnson & Johnson will seek the Supreme Court’s review after a federal appeals court declined to revive the company’s bid to use chapter 11 bankruptcy to freeze nearly 40,000 lawsuits linking its talc products to cancer, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. J&J said that it would turn to the nation’s highest court after judges on the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia voted Wednesday against having the entire appellate court reconsider a January ruling by a panel of judges dismissing the chapter 11 case of J&J subsidiary LTL Management LLC. J&J created the LTL subsidiary in 2021 and placed it in chapter 11 to move mass talc-injury lawsuits the business faced to bankruptcy court for resolution. While the parent company didn’t file for chapter 11, LTL’s bankruptcy filing opened a path to freezing the talc lawsuits against its affiliates, including J&J itself. Other profitable companies have used the same strategy, known in legal circles as the Texas Two-Step, to try to address mass cancer litigation. Wednesday’s ruling means J&J’s hopes for reviving its talc subsidiary’s chapter 11 case now depend on the U.S. Supreme Court, which takes only a small fraction of the petitions it receives.

FTX Group will recover about $404 million that its disgraced founder Sam Bankman-Fried allegedly transferred to the investment fund Modulo Capital, according to a proposed bankruptcy settlement made public yesterday, Bloomberg reported. The agreement adds to the slowly growing pot of money FTX has been trying to collect since the crypto firm filed bankruptcy last year. Modulo Capital, managed by Xiaoyun “Lily” Zhang and Duncan Rheingans-Yoo, got $475 million last year before FTX collapsed into bankruptcy amid fraud allegations, according to the settlement, filed Wednesday afternoon in federal court in Wilmington, Delaware. Modulo has no other money it could use to repay the funds, FTX said. The proposed settlement avoids an expensive lawsuit in which Modulo would fight FTX for the cash, according to court records. FTX said the deal is worth $460 million because it would bring in $404 million in cash and require Zhang and Rheingans-Yoo to drop claims they have against the company for $56 million. The agreement must be approved by Bankruptcy Judge John Dorsey.

The former owner of Silicon Valley Bank, seized earlier this month by regulators, will need to wait, possibly for several months, to know if it can get back about $2 billion in cash it would need to repay bondholders and other creditors, Bloomberg News reported. SVB Financial Group won provisional court approval Tuesday to spend only a fraction of the cash the company claims federal regulators must return. What happens with the rest of the money will need to be decided in the coming months, with lawyers for bondholders owed more than $3.3 billion saying they are concerned that the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. will try to keep the cash. The FDIC’s decision to lock down the $2 billion “creates jeopardy” in the bankruptcy case, said Tom Lauria, a lawyer representing a large bondholder, Appaloosa LP. “It seems to be a more urgent issue than a latent one in the context of this case,” Lauria told Bankruptcy Judge Martin Glenn during a hearing in federal court in Manhattan. Under FDIC receivership rules it can take months for the agency to decide whether the money will be returned and then years if that decision is appealed, lawyers said during the hearing.

The U.S. Senate Banking Committee will hold the first of several hearings on the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank on March 28, Chairman Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) said yesterday, Reuters reported. The first hearing will hear from witnesses including Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Chair Martin Gruenberg, Federal Reserve official Michael Barr, and Nellie Liang, an under secretary at the U.S. Treasury Department, according to a statement from Brown. "It is critical that we get to the bottom of how Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank collapsed so that we can maintain a strong banking system, protect Americans' hard-earned money, and hold those responsible accountable, including the CEOs," Brown said. The U.S. House of Representatives Financial Services Committee previously said it will hold a bipartisan hearing on the banks' collapse on March 29, with Barr and Gruenberg testifying again.