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A New York bankruptcy judge on Wednesday approved Endo International PLC's request to hire a fiduciary in its chapter 11 case to represent the interests of future opioid claimants, Dow Jones Newswires reported. Bankruptcy Judge James Garrity Jr. approved the retention of attorney Roger Frankel to serve as future claims representative in the Endo chapter 11 case. Judge Garrity approved Mr. Frankel's retention after considering an objection by the Justice Department's bankruptcy watchdog which questioned whether other stakeholders in the case had a chance to propose other candidates. An Endo lawyer said yesterday that it had selected Mr. Frankel because of his extensive experience and only after considering more than a dozen other applicants. Mr. Frankel has served as a future claims representative in a number of large chapter 11 cases, including the bankruptcy of Mallinckrodt PLC which, like Endo, filed chapter 11 to resolve opioid-related liabilities.

Canadian movie theater chain Cineplex Inc. has approached lenders to its bankrupt rival Cineworld Group PLC about reviving a potential merger with the U.K. company’s Regal Entertainment Group franchise, the Wall Street Journal reported. Cineplex has started early talks with Cineworld’s lenders about taking over the company’s U.S.-based Regal movie theater chain and handing them debt and stock backed by the merged business in return. Cineplex would need to garner broad-based lender backing for the merger and Cineworld hasn’t signaled support for merging its crown-jewel Regal chain with Cineplex in a bankruptcy deal. Cineworld doesn’t have a clear path out of chapter 11 yet, but it has the right to make its own restructuring offer to creditors before other alternatives can be proposed. Cineworld, which bought Regal for around $4 billion in debt and around $2.3 billion in stock in 2017, filed for bankruptcy with about $5 billion in debt. Its lenders are keeping it afloat through the chapter 11 process and have a significant say in the company’s postbankruptcy future.

Celsius Network Ltd. Chief Executive Officer Alex Mashinsky, who founded the embattled crypto startup and served as pitchman for the sky-high yields it promised to its thousands of investors, is stepping down as the company works its way through bankruptcy, Bloomberg News reported. The Hoboken, NJ-based company said it appointed Chief Financial Officer Chris Ferraro, a JPMorgan Chase & Co. veteran, to the role of chief restructuring officer and interim CEO. The leadership change represents a major shift for the company, which filed for bankruptcy protection in July. Celsius was one of the most notable casualties in this year’s crypto market meltdown, which started with the implosion of the TerraUSD algorithmic stablecoin in May and went on to engulf crypto lender Voyager Digital Holdings Inc., hedge fund Three Arrows Capital and others across the industry while handing investors billions of dollars in losses. Mashinsky, 56, who co-founded Celsius in 2017, said that he will continue “working to help the community unite behind a plan that will provide the best outcome for all creditors — which is what I have been doing since the company filed for bankruptcy,” according to a statement from Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP, the law firm representing Mashinsky. The statement included an excerpt from Mashinsky’s resignation letter, which said that he regrets that his role as CEO “has become an increasing distraction.”

Phoenix Services Topco LLC, an international service provider to steel producers, filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy in an attempt to renegotiate customer contracts it says have become unprofitable due to recent economic pressures, Bloomberg Law reported. The Radnor, Pa.-based company, which employs 2,600 people around the globe, sought chapter 11 protection yesterday in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware with an agreement to borrow $50 million in new financing from its existing lenders and refinance $150 million in pre-bankruptcy debt. Phoenix is controlled by an affiliate of Apollo Global Management Inc. following a 2017 acquisition. Phoenix specializes in removing and handling molten slag that has been separated from steel. The company, which operates at 39 customer sites, also prepares and transports metal scraps, raw materials, and finished products. It entered bankruptcy with $587 million in funded debt. Phoenix’s contract portfolio has recently become “unsustainable” due to “inflationary pressures and rising fuel costs, coupled with suboptimal contract terms,” the company said in court papers. Phoenix has also encountered operational challenges at customer sites, including equipment failures and management turnover, it said. “The contracts and operational challenges, in turn, have placed a significant strain on the debtors’ liquidity, which was further weakened by capital lease payments, rising interest rates, and increased capital expenditures,” the company said. The company has developed a strategy to renegotiate or terminate unprofitable contracts and emerge from bankruptcy in March 2023 “as a going concern with a sustainable and profitable contract portfolio,” it said.

Loyalty Ventures Inc. has hired PJT Partners Inc. to advise on how to restructure its debt less than a year after the company was spun off from Alliance Data Systems Corp., WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. The Texas-based loyalty-programs operator owns and operates the Air Miles Reward Program, which is popular in Canada, and the BrandLoyalty program for grocers and other retailers. The company also creates custom loyalty programs to help retailers retain their customers. The company had about $600 million in long-term debt and about $224 million in liquidity at the end of June, according to its second-quarter earnings report. It recorded about $442 million in losses for the quarter. The company attributed business challenges to a volatile economic environment caused by geopolitical tension, higher energy prices, inflation and declining consumer confidence, Chief Executive Charles Horn said last month. It also has been losing clients to other loyalty-program operators.

Voyager Digital said yesterday that crypto exchange FTX, whose bailout proposal the bankrupt lender had rejected earlier this year, has won its assets in a $1.42-billion bid at an auction, Reuters reported. The FTX bid comprises a fair market value of all Voyager cryptocurrency, at a to-be-determined date, which is pegged at about $1.31 billion at current market prices and an additional $111 million in incremental value, Voyager said in a statement. The company added that its claims against hedge fund Three Arrows Capital will remain with the bankruptcy estate, which will distribute any available recovery on such claims to the estate's creditors. Voyager issued a notice of default to the Singapore-based hedge fund in June, for its failure to make required payments on a loan of 15,250 bitcoin.The company in July spurned a proposal from FTX, founded by billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, as a "low-ball bid dressed up as a white knight rescue" and alleged the plan would disrupt its bankruptcy process.

Two former MoviePass Inc. executives illegally misled investors by promising they could turn a profit charging theater-goers just $9.95 a month for unlimited tickets, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission alleged in a lawsuit, Bloomberg News reported. Theodore Farnsworth and Mitch Lowe were accused by the agency of securities fraud in a complaint filed late Monday in federal court in Manhattan. Farnsworth is the former chief executive officer of the analytics firm Helios and Matheson Analytics Inc., which bought MoviePass in 2017 and ran it until it collapsed into bankruptcy in 2020. Lowe was MoviePass’ CEO from 2016 to 2020. The SEC claims Farnsworth and Lowe made misstatements in financial filings and in the press “regarding whether MoviePass could be profitable at its new, $9.95 per month subscription price.” Before Helios took over, unlimited subscriptions cost $40 to $50 a month.

James Biden, brother of President Biden, has agreed to pay $350,000 to settle a lawsuit alleging he played a role in the financial collapse of a rural hospital operator he advised, Americore Health LLC, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. The proposed settlement resolves a bankruptcy trustee’s lawsuit alleging the hospital company wired Mr. Biden $600,000 in loans in 2018 that were never repaid, even when Americore was strapped for cash. Mr. Biden has contested the allegations, and argued that he has provided financial and consulting services that are of roughly equal value to the payments received, according to settlement papers filed on Friday in the Kentucky bankruptcy court where Americore sought chapter 11 protection in 2019. “Jim had a vision of revitalizing failing rural hospitals,” Mr. Biden’s lawyer, David Randolph Smith, told The Wall Street Journal on Monday. “He provided extensive financial and consulting services to Americore.” Carol Fox, the chapter 11 trustee for Americore, sued Mr. Biden earlier this year, saying that Mr. Biden received the loan money based on his “representations that his last name, ‘Biden,’ could ‘open doors’ and that he could obtain a large investment from the Middle East based on his political connections.” In reality, Ms. Fox said, Mr. Biden helped Americore get “an ill-advised bridge loan from a hedge fund that had a deleterious impact” on the company’s finances, pushing Americore to bankruptcy.

Cryptocurrency lender Celsius Network LLC attracted scores of people over the last five years who wanted to make money betting on bitcoin. After a crypto crash pushed the company into bankruptcy this summer, some of these amateur investors found unity around a new goal: getting that money back, the Wall Street Journal reported. Thousands of Celsius customers are gathering on social media apps such as Telegram and Reddit to parse legal filings together, pooling funds to pay for lawyers and making YouTube summaries of developments at court hearings. Some are reading up on U.S. bankruptcy law, providing translations for non-English speakers and trying to engineer their own white-knight rescue deals. They face an uphill battle in chapter 11 bankruptcy negotiations, where small customers are vulnerable to losses and rarely have a seat at a table typically dominated by lawyers and advisers. The company has at least two more months to formulate a reorganization plan that will determine what happens to customer accounts and how assets will be distributed. Some customers are asking the U.S. Bankruptcy Court judge overseeing the case in the Southern District of New York to let them salvage remaining assets for themselves. Celsius, founded in 2017 by Alex Mashinsky, became a big cryptocurrency lender by pledging to upend traditional banking and allow regular people a way to tap into the potential of digital currencies. Celsius took deposits and made loans, while paying far more on those deposits than a federally regulated bank would. Mr. Mashinsky also became a regular fixture at crypto conferences, donning a T-shirt that read, “Banks are not your friends.” But lofty yields to depositors and large loans backed by little collateral left Celsius without much of a cushion when the cryptocurrency market imploded earlier this year. Celsius paused all withdrawals in June and filed for bankruptcy in July, saying that it owed customers nearly $4.7 billion in crypto. The deficit between the firm’s liabilities and assets, which includes crypto as well as other holdings, was roughly $1.2 billion. The company said as of its filing it had 1.7 million customers, including 300,000 with accounts worth over $100.

Voyager Digital Ltd Chief Financial Officer Ashwin Prithipaul is preparing to step down from his role within months of his appointment at the crypto lender that filed for bankruptcy in July, Reuters reported. The company said on Friday that the finance head would resign after a "transition period" to pursue other opportunities, and that Chief Executive Officer Stephen Ehrlich will head the role in the interim. Crypto lenders such as Voyager boomed during the COVID-19 pandemic, drawing depositors with high interest rates and easy access to loans rarely offered by traditional banks. But inflation and subsequent rate hikes by the U.S. Federal Reserve led to a wide sell-off in the alternative asset class that dealt a heavy blow to several companies in the sector.