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A company owned by far-right radio host Alex Jones filed for bankruptcy after being hit by a flurry of lawsuits, Bloomberg News reported. Infowars sought chapter 11 protection in Southern Texas, with liabilities of as much as $10 million, according to a court filing. Chapter 11 filings allow a business to keep operating while working on a turnaround plan, and pause pending civil litigation. Jones and his companies last year were found liable in a defamation lawsuit brought by relatives of children killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre after Jones called the shootings a hoax. A trial in Connecticut to determine the size of the damages has yet to take place. He was also found liable in similar proceedings in Texas.

The U.S. Internal Revenue Service has lifted its objection to Limerick-based aircraft lessor Nordic Aviation Capital’s bankruptcy plan, the Independent reported. Nordic Aviation Capital (NAC) has been seeking to get out from under $6.3bn (€5.8bn) of debt by handing it to lenders. The IRS said in a filing on April 15 that it was withdrawing its objection to the bankruptcy plan on the condition that the lenders pay any administrative claims without the IRS having to file a request for them. The IRS had raised a last-minute objection to the plan last week on technical grounds. NAC entered chapter 11 in December 2021, with a final hearing in the case — when a U.S. court in the state of Virginia will be asked to approve NAC’s restructuring deal with its creditors and debtors — scheduled for tomorrow. The outstanding tax debt owed by Nordic is modest, around $250,000.

A Georgia insurance company owner has been sentenced to eight months in prison after prosecutors said he lied in bankruptcy court and on his federal tax returns, the Insurance Journal reported. Jacques Andres Frym, who owned businesses in the Savannah, Ga., area, pleaded guilty last year to lying under oath about his income. Frym at one time owned Federal Employee Benefits LLC, an insurance company, along with real estate and other interests, federal court records show. In 2016, Frym filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection to manage more than $5 million in debt. But he falsely testified that he performed no work for and had no income from Federal Employee Benefits, according to the charging information sheet. “In fact, the defendant knew that he sold, and was the primary individual responsible for selling, insurance contracts on behalf of Federal Employee Benefits,” prosecutors noted in the filing. He also understated his income on his 2017 tax return, court records show. In addition to jail time, Frym must also pay $112,000 in restitution and a $30,000 fine. Once released, he will face three years of supervised release, the federal court said.

The Boy Scouts of America yesterday wrapped up a month-long court hearing over its proposed reorganization plan and $2.7 billion settlement of claims by thousands of men who say they were sexually abused as children by troop leaders, Reuters reported. Bankruptcy Judge Laurie Selber Silverstein said at the conclusion of the trial that she would rule on the plan and settlement as soon as possible. Lawyers for the youth organization, which has been hit with more than 82,000 abuse claims, said it hopes the settlement will allow it to exit chapter 11 and continue its Scouting mission. Though the deal has support from 86% of abuse claimants who voted on the plan, hundreds of local councils and the Boy Scouts’ two primary insurers, the process of securing approval and emerging from bankruptcy has been contentious for the Irving, Texas-based organization. The Boy Scouts filed for bankruptcy in February 2020 to address sex abuse allegations spanning decades. The plan, if approved, will set up a $2.7 billion trust to be used to compensate survivors who filed claims in the bankruptcy — with the amount tied to the severity of the alleged abuse, and where and when it occurred. The federal government's bankruptcy watchdog, the U.S. Trustee, opposed the plan’s non-debtor releases, which protect people and entities related to the debtor that have not filed for bankruptcy themselves against future litigation. U.S. Trustee attorney David Buchbinder argued on Wednesday that the releases are being given to an overly broad group who he said have not made substantial contributions to the settlement in exchange. Buchbinder also accused the organization of relegating survivors “to a years-long administrative process” designed to be “difficult, expensive and confusing.” Boy Scouts’ attorney Jessica Lauria defended the releases, saying that they were necessary to secure financial contributions for the trust and that many other courts have upheld similar releases.

A bankruptcy judge asked the Boy Scouts of America to justify why more than 100,000 groups that have supported its mission but themselves aren’t in chapter 11 are getting legal protections through the youth organization’s restructuring, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Judge Laurie Selber Silverstein on Tuesday also asked the youth group why it needed such an “elaborate, interconnected” bankruptcy plan when at one point the nonprofit’s reorganization blueprint addressed only its own financial troubles. The Irving, Texas-based group, which filed for bankruptcy in 2020, is in the fifth week of a trial seeking court approval of a $2.7 billion compensation fund that would settle about 82,200 sexual-abuse claims. Nearly 86% of the votes cast favor the group’s plan. One “thing that’s extraordinary about this case is the sheer magnitude of the number of releases being sought here,” said Judge Silverstein, of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Del. She said she heard the number grew to include 100,000 partner organizations. “And then I heard 140,000,” she said. Judge Silverstein asked lawyers for the youth group to discuss those numbers and why they are justified. Boy Scouts lawyer Jessica Lauria said the group’s sponsors, known as chartered organizations, are typically nonprofits like individual churches and parishes.

Ion Geophysical Corp., which develops seismic-mapping software and digital-imaging technology for offshore oil-drilling companies, has filed for chapter 11 protection with plans to hand control to junior bondholders, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Houston-based Ion said cost-cutting measures that clients implemented during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic have remained in place even as energy markets have recovered, hurting its business. Oil-and-gas clients often view Ion’s exploration services and data offerings as discretionary, spending less when budgets are cut, the company said. Ion said that it has entered into a restructuring-support agreement for bondholders owed roughly $124 million in principal and interest to convert that debt to equity in the reorganized business that emerges from chapter 11, according to court papers filed Tuesday in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Houston. While the restructuring proceeds in bankruptcy court, Ion said it would canvass the market and seek higher bids for the potential sale of its assets. The company, which must get bankruptcy-court approval for the sale process, has proposed a June 2 bid deadline, court papers said.

Johnson & Johnson can’t use its baby powder bankruptcy to prevent a lawsuit that accuses the company of hiding evidence that its industrial talc operation exposed workers to the toxic material asbestos, a federal judge ruled. The judge overseeing the bankruptcy case of LTL Management sided with the family of a man who sued J&J in 1986. The man agreed to drop his lawsuit after the company produced sworn testimony claiming no tests ever showed J&J’s industrial talc contained asbestos, according to court documents. He died in 1994. The family now plans to sue J&J, saying that testimony was false, citing new evidence. In court papers, lawyers for the family allege that thousands of asbestos suits against J&J failed because of false information provided by the company. Asbestos is an industrial material that is known to cause fatal lung disorders. Until it was found to be toxic, the product was used in everything from insulation to automobile brakes. Since the 1980s, companies have paid tens of billions of dollars to hundreds of thousands of victims.

Protecting local Boy Scouts of America councils and troop sponsoring organizations from future liability for child sex abuse claims is critical to the national group’s reorganization plan, BSA attorneys told a Delaware bankruptcy judge Tuesday, the Associated Press reported. Attorneys opposing the plan countered that liability releases for non-debtor third parties are neither fair nor necessary, and that they infringe on the rights of abuse survivors to seek compensation for their abuse. The Boy Scouts, based in Irving, Texas, petitioned for bankruptcy protection in February 2020, seeking to halt hundreds of individual lawsuits and create a settlement trust for abuse victims. Although the organization faced about 275 lawsuits at the time, more than 82,000 sexual abuse claims have been filed in the bankruptcy case. The reorganization plan calls for the Boys Scouts and its 250 local councils, along with settling insurance companies and troop sponsoring organizations, to contribute some $2.6 billion in cash and property and assign their insurance rights to a settlement trust fund for abuse victims. More than half that money would come from the BSA’s two largest insurers, Century Indemnity Co. and The Hartford. Those companies would contribute $800 million and $787 million, respectively.

Dozens of sex-abuse victims asked a bankruptcy judge on Monday to strike down the Boy Scouts of America’s reorganization plan, saying that the proposal deprives them of rights to collect insurance payments in the millions of dollars, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. The victims, many of whom suffered at the hands of a single priest on the island of Guam, and the Archdiocese of Agana, which sponsored Boy Scouts activities on the island, are among the remaining parties still opposing the approval of the youth group’s $2.7 billion settlement. A trial held during the past four weeks over the Boy Scouts reorganization plan before Judge Laurie Selber Silverstein is expected to wrap up this week. If approved, the Boy Scouts’ plan would grant the archdiocese, as well as insurers Hartford Financial Services Group Inc. and Chubb Ltd.’s Century Indemnity Co., immunity from litigation over the abuses, without making additional payments to or obtaining consent from the Guam victims, according to a court filing by lawyers of the victims. Hartford and Century, combined, have agreed to contribute more than $1.6 billion of the funds toward the settlement with all Boy Scouts plaintiffs. The Guam archdiocese filed its own bankruptcy in 2019 over abuse claims related to Boy Scouts and church activities and is working on its own reorganization plan. While the Guam victims can still go after insurance policies covering the Archdiocese of Agana, the Boy Scouts plan would prevent them from pursuing those policies covering the archdiocese for abuses tied to scouting activities, they have argued in court papers.