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Norway's $1.5 trillion sovereign wealth fund, the world's largest, said on Friday it has been appointed by a U.S. court to co-lead an ongoing U.S. securities class action relating to the now-bankrupt Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), Reuters reported. SVB's collapse in March was the trigger for the worst banking shock since the 2008 global financial crisis, sending bank stocks globally on a wild ride. The Norwegian fund said the SVB case raised significant concerns regarding the integrity of the public markets, the governance of large financial institutions and the interests of the investor community more broadly. "We manage money on behalf of all Norwegians. I see it as our duty to take legal action to both maximise our recoveries after the SVB collapse and to signal that this is not acceptable market behaviour," the fund's Chief Executive Nicolai Tangen said in a statement. The fund, which invests Norway's surplus oil and gas revenue abroad, is the world's biggest single stock market investor, owning some 1.5% of all globally listed shares with stakes in more than 9,200 companies. It held a 1% stake in SVB at the end of 2022, valued at $137.9 million, according to data on the fund's website. The other co-lead plaintiff in the class action is Swedish pension fund Sjunde AP-fonden (AP7), the Norwegian fund said.

Chinese property giant Evergrande and its biggest foreign creditors are negotiating an 11th-hour deal to prevent a liquidation of the company’s offshore businesses on Monday, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Evergrande and a group of its bondholders have been negotiating to restructure the financially troubled company after Chinese regulators vetoed a previous version of their plan. In a recent proposal, Evergrande has offered to give control of around 20% of its Guangdong-based parent company, China Evergrande Group, to its creditors. To comply with Chinese regulators’ demands, Evergrande wouldn’t issue new debt as part of the restructuring. Additionally, Evergrande is in discussions with NWTN, a Dubai-based electric-vehicle company, to invest new money in Evergrande’s EV unit, the people said. NWTN had agreed to invest $500 million for a 28% stake in Evergrande Auto, which would have helped Evergrande Auto’s expansion, but NWTN temporarily suspended its commitment to invest the funds when Evergrande’s earlier restructuring plan fell apart, according to securities filings.

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office has asked a federal judge to reject an attempt by former Edenville Dam owner Lee Mueller to shield himself from a nearly $120 million judgment through bankruptcy protection, MLive.com reported. On Nov. 16, Nessel’s office motioned for dismissal of Mueller’s chapter 13 case in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Nevada, calling the former dam owner’s filing a “bad faith” effort to avoid paying judgments following the 2020 Michigan flooding disaster. Mueller, of Las Vegas, was ordered to pay $119,825,000 in natural resource damages by a federal judge in Michigan, who issued a default judgment against the former Boyce Hydro owner on Nov. 27 after ruling in February he was personally liable for the death of fish and freshwater mussels during the flood. In the state’s motion in Nevada, assistant attorney general Nathan Gambill called Mueller “one of the worst environmental wrongdoers in Michigan history.” “His bankruptcy filings do not reflect it, but Mr. Mueller’s sole purpose in pursuing bankruptcy relief is to discharge court judgments,” Gambill wrote. A spokesperson for Nessel’s office said Michigan seeks to collect on the Nov. 27 judgment “to the fullest extent permitted by law” and use the money for “restorative purposes.”

The Supreme Court on Monday will consider the Biden administration’s bid to scuttle a $6 billion accord between bankrupt drugmaker Purdue Pharma LP and its billionaire owners, Bloomberg News reported. The deal would protect members of the Sackler family from future opioid lawsuits by way of an oft-used legal mechanism that the high court is now scrutinizing for the first time. If upheld, the settlement would snuff out an inferno of civil lawsuits blaming Purdue’s owners for the company’s aggressive marketing of OxyContin and, in exchange, route billions of dollars to victims, states and communities harmed by the nation’s addiction crisis. The proposal won overwhelming support from opioid crisis victims who voted on it, but there remains a vocal contingent bitterly opposed to letting Purdue’s billionaire owners put the lawsuits behind them. Detractors may get their way because of the challenge from a unit of the Justice Department. At issue is a component of the settlement that forces all opioid victims to give up their claims against the Sacklers even if they’d prefer to take their chances with a jury. Congress authorized similar maneuvers decades ago in bankruptcies related to asbestos lawsuits, and over time, lawyers and bankruptcy courts reasoned that the mandate could be expanded to an array of corporate wrongdoing. Similar deals have ended mass litigation over dangerous products and waves of sex abuse claims against Catholic dioceses, the Boy Scouts of America and USA Gymnastics. They even appear in some mundane acquisitions of bankrupt firms. But federal appeals courts are split over whether the linchpin of these agreements — provisions called nonconsensual third-party releases — are lawful.

Crypto lender Celsius Network may have to seek a new creditor vote on its proposed transformation into a bitcoin-mining business, a U.S. bankruptcy judge said during a court hearing on Thursday, Reuters reported. Celsius said last week that it had reduced its post-bankruptcy business plans to focus only on bitcoin-mining, citing the skepticism of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) about its other planned business lines. Bankruptcy Judge Martin Glenn of New York, who is overseeing Celsius' chapter 11 process, expressed frustration on Thursday about the late pivot, saying that he had been a "broken record" about Celsius's need to reach agreement with the SEC. "This is not the deal that the creditors voted on," Glenn said. The revised deal could face "substantial opposition" from creditors, he said. The SEC did not definitively object to Celsius' bankruptcy plan before it was approved, but Celsius said the agency was unwilling to approve crypto lending and staking activity that the agency has opposed in the past.

A Chilean wind farm operator backed by Latin American Power has filed for bankruptcy in the U.S. with a restructuring deal that would provide financial relief from a debt default due to increased competition and severe drought, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Santiago-based Inversiones Latin America Power filed for chapter 11 Thursday in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan, with more than $400 million of debt. Chief Executive Esteban Moraga said a 2019 move by the Chilean government to phase out coal plants and make the country carbon-neutral by 2050 resulted in a proliferation of new renewable projects, in turn creating a shortage of transmission capacity. Other factors pressuring the company’s finances include volatility in the Chilean energy market due to severe drought conditions, he said in a sworn declaration filed in bankruptcy court. Those conditions have resulted in lower energy-generation at the company’s two wind farms, forcing it to buy energy at significantly higher prices in the spot market to honor customer contracts. That move has hurt cash flow, making the company unable to meet its debt obligations. Earlier this year, Inversiones defaulted on its debt and its credit ratings were lowered, partly due to spot price volatility.

Bankrupt trucking company Yellow is considering an offer to revive the carrier and rehire thousands of its former workers as it weighs competing bids at a court-supervised auction that would disperse its nationwide network of truck terminals to rivals, the Wall Street Journal reported. Sarah Riggs Amico, executive chair of auto-carrier Jack Cooper Transport, is leading a bid that would replace Yellow, which shut down over the summer, with a smaller, leaner trucking company that aims to win back some of the billions of dollars worth of freight business that has shifted to a range of other carriers. The bid faces major hurdles, including persuading the federal government to extend a $700 million loan made to Yellow during the COVID-19 pandemic that is due in 2024. It also comes as Yellow is deep in the process of selling off tens of thousands of trucks and trailers and about 170 North American truck terminals, assets that have been valued at a total of more than $2 billion. Yellow has already begun sending its equipment to liquidators for sale over the coming year, and it has accepted a stalking-horse bid of $1.525 billion from rival trucker Estes Express Lines for its real estate holdings, which are being auctioned this week.

Conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices on Wednesday signaled skepticism toward the legality of certain proceedings conducted in-house by the Securities and Exchange Commission to enforce investor-protection laws - a case that gives them an opportunity to further undercut the power of federal agencies, Reuters reported. The court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, heard arguments in an appeal by President Joe Biden's administration of a lower court's ruling that deemed unconstitutional the SEC's tribunal proceedings before administrative judges installed by the agency that can lead to financial penalties for infractions. The conservative justices focused on a part of the 2022 ruling by the New Orleans-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit that found that in-house proceedings violated the U.S. Constitution's Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial. Texas-based hedge fund manager George Jarkesy, whom the SEC fined and barred from the industry after determining he had committed securities fraud, challenged the legality of the agency's system. His lawsuit was supported by numerous conservative and business groups, which long have complained about the regulatory reach of the federal "administrative state" in areas such as energy, the environment, climate policy, workplace safety and financial regulation. The conservative justices expressed concern that SEC administrative proceedings are conducted for certain charges, such as fraud, without a jury, when similar cases alleging fraud in federal court would have one. "It does seem to me to be curious that - and unlike most constitutional rights - you have that right until the government decides that they don't want you to have it. That doesn't seem to me the way the Constitution normally works," Chief Justice John Roberts said.

FTX Trading Ltd. won bankruptcy court approval to begin selling its stakes in digital trusts managed by crypto firm Grayscale Investments in order to raise money to repay creditors owed billions of dollars, Bloomberg News reported. FTX plans to sell the assets in a way that maximizes the value and avoids disrupting the market for the digital investments, according to court documents. Grayscale sold investments linked to various digital currencies. The buyers didn’t hold the actual currencies, but instead got shares in trusts that Grayscale put together and managed. FTX’s stakes in the trusts were worth about $744 million as of last month, the company said in court papers. Since FTX filed for bankruptcy last year amid fraud allegations, the company’s advisers have been tracking down assets and trying to untangle a complex web of debts owed to various creditors, including customers who put cash and crypto on the trading platform. FTX’s administrators have so far recovered about $7 billion in assets, including $3.4 billion of crypto, according to court documents.

A prominent Pacific Northwest lobbying and public affairs firm has filed for chapter 11 protection amid a bitter legal dispute between estranged co-owners, the Seattle Times reported. Seattle-based Strategies 360 filed a petition on Monday in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Western District of Washington in an effort to stave off what CEO Ron Dotzauer described in court filings as a hostile and humiliating takeover bid by his former business partner, Eric Sorenson. A legal fight between the two men has been brewing for years over Dotzauer’s failure to pay Sorenson $6 million as part of an agreement to buy out his former 49% ownership stake in the firm, court records show.