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U.S. prosecutors on Tuesday unveiled a new indictment against Sam Bankman-Fried, accusing the founder of now-bankrupt FTX cryptocurrency exchange of conspiring to pay a $40 million bribe to Chinese government officials, Reuters reported. The new bribery conspiracy charge adds the pressure on the 31-year-old former billionaire, who now faces a 13-count indictment over the November collapse of FTX. Prosecutors had previously accused Bankman-Fried of stealing billions of dollars in customer funds to plug losses at his Alameda Research hedge fund, and orchestrating an illegal campaign donation scheme to buy influence in Washington, D.C. Bankman-Fried is expected to be arraigned on Thursday in Manhattan federal court. U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan will also consider modifications to his $250 million bail package. The indictment said Bankman-Fried ordered the $40 million cryptocurrency payment to a private wallet from Alameda's main trading account, to persuade Chinese authorities to unfreeze Alameda accounts with more than $1 billion of cryptocurrency.

A federal judge on Monday temporarily stopped bankrupt Voyager Digital from completing a proposed $1.3 billion sale to crypto exchange Binance.US, allowing the U.S. government more time to pursue appeals that challenge the legality of the deal, Reuters reported. The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York and the Office of the U.S. Trustee, the Department of Justice's (DOJ) bankruptcy watchdog, filed appeals in early March over a bankruptcy court's approval of the sale. They argued that the protections could rubber stamp crypto tokens that might be unregistered securities, as well as transactions that could be illegal under U.S. securities laws. U.S. District Judge Jennifer Rearden in Manhattan ruled Monday that the sale should be put on hold, overruling Voyager's argument that a delay could cause Binance.US to back out of the deal entirely. Binance.US and Voyager did not immediately respond to requests for comment late on Monday.

Binance and its founder Changpeng Zhao are being sued by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for numerous alleged violations of the Commodity Exchange Act and CFTC regulations, the Associated Press reported. Binance’s former chief compliance officer, Samuel Lim, was also charged with aiding and abetting Binance’s violations. In its complaint, the CFTC claimed that cryptocurrency exchange giant Binance “allegedly chose to knowingly disregard applicable provisions of the CEA while engaging in a calculated strategy of regulatory arbitrage to their commercial benefit.” For example, Binance did not require customers to provide any identity-verifying information. It also communicated with U.S. customers using a messaging platform that automatically deleted written communications. The CFTC filed the complaint Monday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. It is seeking disgorgement, civil monetary penalties, permanent trading and registration bans, and a permanent injunction against further violations of the CEA and CFTC regulations.

Alex Jones started getting a share of Infowars advertising revenue weeks after the conspiracy website filed for chapter 11 and his salary was slashed, a now-ended arrangement only recently disclosed to the bankruptcy judge, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Judge Christopher Lopez of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Houston, who is overseeing both Infowars’s chapter 11 and Mr. Jones’s personal bankruptcy, said Monday that he was “troubled” by the revenue sharing arrangement. Bankruptcy rules forbid company owners or other outside parties from taking funds out of a business without court approval or notice to creditors. Mr. Jones’s lawyer, Vickie Driver, said her client now knows the arrangement wasn’t permitted and is returning funds he received. Infowars restructuring chief Patrick Magill, appointed after the company filed for bankruptcy protection last year, recently discovered some advertising revenue was split between Mr. Jones and another unnamed company employee. The two recipients have since agreed to return the $243,742 they received to bankrupt parent company Free Speech Systems LLC, according to court documents.

Codiak BioSciences Inc. said yesterday that it has filed for chapter 11 protection in the latest blow to the struggling drug developer's ambitions of making a COVID-19 vaccine, Reuters reported. The chapter 11 filing ends months of investor uncertainty after the company, which has been facing a cash crunch, raised going concern doubts and cut its workforce by 37% last year. The company said yesterday that it will cut an additional 34 jobs, bringing its total number of employees to 19, and expects to incur severance-related costs of about $1.1 million. Codiak previously said it would prioritize its COVID-19 vaccine development program that was funded by a global vaccine coalition, while halting development of two cancer drug candidates which were ready for mid-stage study. The company will also wind down a clinical trial of its drug for a type of bone marrow cancer, according to a filing yesterday. The $2.5-million funding by the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations in July was aimed at an experimental vaccine that would target COVID-19 as well as other coronaviruses.

The Public Utility Commission of Texas urged the Texas Supreme Court to overturn a court ruling that found the agency overstepped its authority by allowing power prices to soar during the state’s deadly 2021 winter storm, Reuters reported. The PUCT defended its actions during the storm in an appeal filed Thursday, writing that regulators made “split-second decisions” during a “life-or-death situation” that may not be popular, but were necessary to address a market failure. Attorneys for the regulator said the recent ruling against them has “thrown Texas’s electricity and associated markets into confusion.” Last week a state appeals court stunned the Texas power market by siding with power generator Vistra Corp. which claimed in a lawsuit that PUCT had exceeded its authority by pinning prices to $9,000-per-megawatt-hour for days during the February 2021 storm, resulting in billions of dollars in overcharges to consumers. The decision reversed a pair of orders by the commission.

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.

A federal judge curbed Puerto Rico bondholders’ rights to the electric revenue generated by its public power utility, the last major public corporation in the U.S. territory still in bankruptcy after its other public debts were restructured, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Judge Laura Taylor Swain ruled on Wednesday that utility bondholders’ collateral rights don’t extend to the current and future revenue of the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, known as Prepa. Bondholders were deemed to have a security interest only in certain funds in Prepa’s reserve accounts, which represent a fraction of their claims. Judge Swain said that bondholders have only an unsecured claim to the utility’s future net revenue, or its excess funds after operating expenses are paid. Further proceedings are needed to value that unsecured claim, which covers the future revenue that would have become payable to bondholders over the life of Prepa’s $8.3 billion in municipal debt, according to the decision.

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.