Cineworld Group Plc said it intends to emerge from bankruptcy intact after senior lenders were said to be considering a sale process for its east European operations, Bloomberg News reported. The London-based company filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy in Texas in September to cut a near $9 billion pile of debt and leases. “Cineworld remains committed to working with its key stakeholders to develop a Chapter 11 reorganization plan that seeks to maximize value for the benefit of moviegoers and all other stakeholders,” a spokesperson said on Sunday. “Cineworld has not initiated, and does not intend to initiate, an individual auction for any of its US, U.K. or RoW [rest of world] businesses on an individual basis.” The statement follows a Bloomberg News report on Friday that Cineworld’s creditors had held talks about breaking up the chain and selling its eastern European operations. According to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified discussing private deliberations, the company’s largest senior creditors were weighing the sale of Cinema City, Yes Planet and Rav-Chen, an Israeli operation. The eastern European operations include cinemas in Poland, Hungary and Romania.
Carolina Panthers owner David Tepper and his real estate company are the focus of a criminal investigation to see if they misused any public money in their failed effort to build a practice facility for the NFL team in South Carolina, the Associated Press reported. The York County Sheriff’s Office said state agents and local prosecutors are aiding its investigation, and that the probe does not mean that any crime happened. “An investigation is simply an inquiry and should not create any inference that wrongdoing has been committed by any party,” York County Sheriff Kevin Tolson and Solicitor Kevin Brackett said in a joint statement Thursday night that named Tepper and GT Real Estate, the company created to oversee the construction project. Tepper’s company denied any criminal wrongdoing and suggested the timing of the announcement might be meant to disrupt a settlement the team reached with York County to repay more than $21 million, an amount roughly equivalent to the sales tax money the project received to improve roads around the facility.
A U.S. Justice Department bankruptcy watchdog called for an independent investigation into FTX’s collapse, comparing the cryptocurrency platform’s sudden failure to the fall of Lehman Brothers, the Wall Street Journal reported. U.S. Trustee Andrew Vara, an official at the Justice Department unit monitoring bankruptcy courts, asked the judge overseeing FTX’s chapter 11 case to appoint an independent examiner to provide a transparent account of FTX’s failure because of the wider implications the exchange’s collapse has on the crypto industry. FTX’s collapse “is likely the fastest big corporate failure in American history,” said Vara, saying the platform suffered an astonishing loss in value from a market high of $32 billion earlier this year to bankruptcy. Vara said that an examiner is necessary to investigate “the substantial and serious allegations of fraud, dishonesty, incompetence, misconduct, and mismanagement” at FTX and circumstances around its collapse. Vara also said that an examiner should review whether any viable legal claims exist to remedy losses of FTX customers. He said reports produced by the examiner appointed in the bankruptcies of Lehman and subprime lender New Century Financial “stand as examples of the bankruptcy system serving the public interest in transparency and accountability.”
Alex Jones filed for bankruptcy on Friday, less than two months after a jury ordered him and the parent company of his Infowars website to pay nearly $1 billion in compensatory damages to relatives of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook mass shooting, Reuters reported. Jones filed for chapter 11 protection from creditors with the U.S. bankruptcy court in Houston, a court filing showed. The filing said Jones has between $1 million and $10 million of assets and between $1 billion and $10 billion of liabilities. n October, a Connecticut jury in a case brought by relatives of more than a dozen Sandy Hook victims ordered Jones and Free Speech Systems, the parent company of Infowars, to pay nearly $1 billion in damages. Free Speech Systems filed for bankruptcy in July. In a separate case in Texas, a jury in August decided Jones must pay the parents of a 6-year-old boy killed in the Sandy Hook massacre $45.2 million in punitive damages, on top of $4.1 million in compensatory damages.
Online wine club Winc Inc. filed for chapter 11 protection, just over a year after the company’s initial public offering, Bloomberg News reported. The subscription service listed $50.3 million of assets and $36.8 million in liabilities in its bankruptcy petition, which was filed on Wednesday in Delaware. The company is arranging a buyer for its assets and has hired Canaccord Genuity Group Inc. as its investment banker, according to court papers. Winc was founded in 2012 as Club W. It’s aimed at helping younger consumers buy wine online, personalized to their tastes. It ships customers proprietary bottles based on results from an online quiz, and promising savings and convenience from cutting out middle men. The company garnered funding from backers including Bessemer Venture Partners. Winc raised $22 million in an initial public offering in November 2021, touting itself as “one of the fastest growing at scale wineries in the United States.” But it never turned a profit, and its shares slid 98% from their $13 debut to around 30 cents on Wednesday before the filing. Meta Platforms Inc. is listed as the company’s largest unsecured creditor, with a $724,000 trade claim.
Citigroup Inc. is negotiating the return of about $500 million it mistakenly paid a group of hedge funds and investment firms on a loan owed by Revlon Inc., the now-bankrupt cosmetics company controlled by billionaire Ronald Perelman, Reuters reported. In a Thursday filing in Manhattan federal court, lawyers for the bank and the lenders said they have been discussing a "consensual resolution" to end Citigroup's August 2020 lawsuit to recoup the mistaken payment. While no agreement has been reached, the lawyers said "material terms" of a settlement would provide for the return of Citigroup's money, with the bank transferring interest and amortization payments it began receiving in early 2021. Talks to end the lawsuit had been disclosed on Nov. 10. The lawyers asked U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman to let them update the status by Dec. 5. Citigroup, which was Revlon's loan agent, had accidentally used its own money in August 2020 to pay off the company's $894 million loan three years early instead of paying $7.8 million in interest.
Reverse Mortgage Investment Trust Inc., one of the nation’s largest mortgage lenders that enables people to tap the equity built up in their homes, has filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. The Bloomfield, N.J.-based company partly attributed rising interest rates to the disruption of its business. Reverse Mortgage said it faced a liquidity crunch and stopped mortgage origination in early November as it had to increase the capital to support the origination of new loans and to service portfolios. Reverse mortgages are typically made to seniors looking to tap the value built up in their homes. Backed by investment firm Starwood Capital Group, the company lists both assets and liabilities of $10 billion to $50 billion, according to a court filing. Reverse Mortgage is in talks to ensure that its servicing portfolio is managed and that work has begun to transfer loans in its pipeline to other lenders. Reverse Mortgage, established in 2012, is at least the second real-estate lender to file for bankruptcy this year. In June, residential lender First Guaranty Mortgage Corp. filed for bankruptcy as fewer home borrowers were refinancing due to rising interest rates and tight housing supply.
Sam Bankman-Fried said that he didn’t intend to commit any fraud or use customer funds to back leveraged bets that went wrong at Alameda Research, a cryptocurrency hedge fund attached to FTX that pushed the exchange to bankruptcy, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Mr. Bankman-Fried denied knowingly commingling customer funds to back his crypto trading operation and tried to deflect some of the blame for FTX’s collapse away from himself, saying he was surprised at the size of Alameda’s bets that went wrong. “I didn’t know exactly what was going on,” Mr. Bankman-Fried said via livestream from the Bahamas. “I learned a lot of these things as they were going on.” The comments came at Mr. Bankman-Fried’s first known public appearance since he resigned from FTX and the firm collapsed into the largest-ever bankruptcy by a cryptocurrency platform. FTX, long a chaotic mess despite its public image of stability, failed after dipping into customer funds to back billions of dollars in risky bets by Alameda, its affiliated trading firm. New managers hired to steer the firm through bankruptcy are only beginning to sift through FTX’s liabilities and hunt down assets that left it before it failed. The firm was plagued by an unprecedented lack of corporate controls, according to its new management, and cryptocurrencies deposited by millions of customers are still frozen on the exchange, with little indication of how much they will get back or when.
Senate Banking Committee Chair Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) yesterday pressed U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen for help in securing legislation to better regulate cryptocurrency, the latest sign of pressure for tougher regulations following the collapse of crypto exchange FTX, Reuters reported. Brown also urged the Financial Stability Oversight Council (FSOC), a U.S. regulatory panel comprising top financial regulators, to find ways to enhance crypto asset disclosures and bolster market integrity. "It is crucial that risks in this area are contained and do not spill over into traditional financial markets and institutions, and we draw the correct lessons regarding customer and investor protection," said Brown, who is chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. FTX filed for bankruptcy on Nov. 11 after traders pulled $6 billion from the platform in three days and rival exchange Binance abandoned a rescue deal, sending shock waves across the crypto market. In his letter to Yellen, Brown also urged the FSOC to press forward with recommendations made by the council in an October report stemming from U.S. President Joe Biden's executive order this year "on Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets." In that report, regulators identified several gaps in the oversight of cryptocurrencies, including in the crypto spot market for tokens that are not securities. Read more.
In related news, the Senate Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry Committee will hold a hearing at 10 a.m. ET today titled "Why Congress Needs to Act: Lessons Learned from the FTX Collapse." Commodity Futures Trading Commission Chair Rostin Behnam is scheduled to testify. Click here for a live web stream of the hearing.
BlockFi Inc. told a U.S. bankruptcy court on Tuesday it was blindsided by cryptocurrency exchange FTX’s rapid demise and would work to repay creditors and allow customers access to their digital wallets as soon as possible, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Jersey City, N.J.-based BlockFi, which secured a rescue loan from FTX in June to shore up its liquidity, reviewed unaudited FTX financial reports as part of due diligence it performed at the time of the transactions, said Joshua Sussberg, a lawyer for BlockFi, during its debut hearing in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Trenton, N.J. BlockFi filed for chapter 11 on Monday after the loan fell apart in the wake of FTX’s collapse earlier in November. BlockFi, which also counts FTX as one of its largest borrowers, is an early victim brought down by FTX’s downfall in an exceptionally intertwined and lightly regulated sector. Over the past few months, since a drastic drop in crypto prices that has wiped out roughly two-thirds of the sector’s market value, crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital, digital-assets lender Celsius Network LLC and crypto brokerage firm Voyager Digital have filed for chapter 11 protection. Given its entangled relationship with FTX, BlockFi on Tuesday sought to distinguish itself from the failed platform by assuring customers that it had appropriate internal controls in place and that it is working to return client funds as soon as possible. Read more.
In related news, a BlockFi representative laid the blame for the crypto lender’s bankruptcy filing on Monday squarely on FTX Trading, whose Alameda Research affiliate defaulted on $680 million of collateralized loans to the digital financing platform, Forbes reported. BlockFi also sued a company controlled by FTX founder Samuel Bankman-Fried, apparently seeking to take control of a 56.3 million-share stake in the online brokerage Robinhood, after a separate default. In the bankruptcy case, an affidavit by Mark A. Renzi of Berkeley Research Group, a proposed financial adviser to BlockFi, revealed what the company’s communications earlier in the day hinted at: that financial exposure to the collapsed FTX conglomerate was the proximate cause of Monday’s petition for protection from creditors. FTX had engineered a bailout of BlockFi over the summer, as the collapse of the luna and terraUSD cryptocurrencies set off a cascade of liquidity events in the digital assets market. The deal had included a credit line of $400 million that BlockFi could tap. The company borrowed about $275 million, the affidavit indicated, and then sought $125 million more on November 8. FTX did not provide the additional funds, and it filed its own chapter 11 case three days later. Read more.
