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The Diocese of Rochester (N.Y.) reached a $55 million deal to compensate 475 individual claims of childhood sex abuse while scrapping an earlier pact with its insurers and allowing abuse victims to pursue litigation to unlock additional insurance payouts, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. The deal announced on Thursday marks a new phase in the three-year-old bankruptcy case and ends an earlier settlement between the New York diocese and its insurers, which had agreed to pay more than $107 million to compensate victims. Victims’ representatives opposed the earlier deal, saying the insurers weren’t paying enough. The new agreement unveiled Thursday “represents the fairest approach for the survivors and the most viable path forward,” Bishop Salvatore Matano said in a statement. The Diocese of Rochester’s insurers didn’t immediately return requests for comment. Some victims’ lawyers said Thursday that it should be able to wrap up its bankruptcy case within six months.

After three years in bankruptcy court and many months of negotiations, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Rochester (N.Y.) and more than 400 sexual abuse survivors with claims in the diocese’s chapter 11 bankruptcy have agreed to terms, the Rochester Beacon reported. “There’s still a long road ahead,” predicts James Cali, chairman of the bankruptcy’s official creditors committee. Formed by the U.S. Trustee to represent survivors’ interests, the creditors committee worked out the settlement’s terms with the diocese. Anticipating a flood of claims under the New York Child Victims Act, the diocese asked for court protection in September 2019, a month after the CVA took effect. The CVA temporarily lifted a statute of limitations that had kept survivors of long-past abuse suffered as children from going after their abusers. A virtual tsunami of CVA cases filed against Catholic churches across the state followed. The Rochester diocese was the first to file for bankruptcy protection in New York. Dioceses in Buffalo, Syracuse and Rockville Center, Long Island, followed and remain to be resolved. Filed Thursday in the Western District of New York Bankruptcy Court’s Rochester Division by the diocese, the agreement calls for the diocese and its parishes to jointly contribute $55 million to a fund to compensate survivors. The bankruptcy will not be finally resolved until the diocese puts forward a reorganization plan that creditors agree to and Bankruptcy Judge Paul Warren signs off on.

An Iowa grain company that does business in Minnesota has gone bankrupt and the Minnesota Department of Agriculture is advising farmers that they may need to file a claim against the company, AgWeek.com reported. Global Processing Inc. is based in Kanawha, Iowa, and operating in Hope, Minn. The company filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy on Oct. 24. Anyone who has not received payment for grain or who had grain stored with Global Processing Inc. is encouraged to submit a bond claim with the Minnesota Department of Agriculture. The Hope facility, in accordance with state law, held a $50,000 bond with the state. Farmers should submit a claim as soon as possible. The deadline for claims is April 24, 2023. The ag department will review all claims to determine which claims are valid. In the case of multiple valid claims, a pro-rated share will be calculated and dispersed.

Some of Revlon's creditors have asked a U.S. bankruptcy judge in Manhattan to unwind the bankrupt cosmetic giant's 2020 loan restructuring, saying that a group of senior lenders fleeced other creditors by improperly laying claim to the company's valuable intellectual property assets, Reuters reported. The creditors, including Brigade Capital and Nuveen Asset Management, in a court filing late Monday accused a separate faction of lenders, known as the Brandco lenders, of exerting enormous leverage over Revlon's bankruptcy proceedings based on "sham" loan transactions made in 2019 and 2020. If successful, their challenge could eliminate the Brandco lenders' right to claim Revlon's brands as their exclusive collateral, reducing the Brandco lenders' leverage in the bankruptcy. Both lender groups participated in a $2 billion loan that Revlon used to purchase Elizabeth Arden in 2016. But the Brandco lenders, which include private equity and hedge funds such as Ares Management and Oak Hill Advisors, then loaned Revlon additional money and claimed more of Revlon's assets as collateral, in violation of the 2016 loan agreement, according to the filing. When Revlon filed for bankruptcy in June, the Brandco lenders held about $1.88 billion of Revlon's $3.5 billion debt. They loaned the company another $975 million to fund the chapter 11 case. Through transactions in 2019 and 2020, Revlon transferred trademarks and other intellectual property rights associated with its beauty brands, including Elizabeth Arden, Almay and Roux, to newly created subsidiaries which took on additional, higher-priority debt than the company's existing debts.

A bankruptcy judge advanced an inquiry into Celsius Network LLC’s business practices and whether it operated as a Ponzi scheme, responding to customer demands to look into how the crypto lender used their money, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. A court-appointed examiner and the official committee of Celsius creditors were instructed in a bankruptcy-court hearing Tuesday to meet and confer about who will lead the probe into whether the firm used some depositors’ money to meet financial obligations to others. “We don’t know if Celsius was a Ponzi scheme, but there are flags that came up,“ said the creditors committee’s lawyer, Greg Pesce. “Let me make it clear we’re looking into whether it is. We don’t have an answer to that.” The examiner, Shoba Pillay, also will broaden the scope of her probe to include the company’s marketing practices and representations it made to attract new customers, as well as its handling of CEL tokens, the firm’s proprietary digital currency. Celsius didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. The closely held crypto firm, which filed for bankruptcy after freezing withdrawals in June amid a meltdown in digital currencies, has faced allegations from customers and state authorities that it made misleading statements about its financial health and used assets of new investors to pay yields to account holders.