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Bankrupt trucking company Yellow Corp received court approval on Tuesday to sell most of its shipping centers and real estate to multiple buyers for $1.88 billion, ending a bidder's long-shot effort to keep the company intact, Reuters reported. Bankruptcy Judge Craig Goldblatt approved the sale at a court hearing in Wilmington, Del., saying that the purchase price was a "tremendous outcome" for the trucking company and its creditors. The sale, which will parcel out 130 of the company's shipping centers to multiple buyers, generated enough cash to pay off the company's $1.2 billion in pre-bankruptcy debt, including $700 million owed on a U.S. Treasury Department COVID-19 pandemic relief loan approved by former President Donald Trump's administration in 2020. Yellow is still seeking buyers for its remaining owned and leased real estate, including 46 shipping terminals, as well as its fleet of trucks. Yellow chose to break up its assets rather than keeping the company intact for an outside buyer, despite pressure from U.S. Senators from both parties who argued that the company should remain intact as a way to save jobs.

WeWork Inc., the embattled coworking giant navigating a bankruptcy, is keeping a Manhattan office spot largely leased to Amazon.com Inc. through a deal that includes reduced rent and a shortened lease term, Bloomberg News reported. WeWork reached a new agreement with its landlord for its space at 1440 Broadway, according to a filing Tuesday. The firm will continue to operate 300,000 square feet (28,000 square meters) spanning 10 floors at the building. The court will still need to approve the agreement. WeWork’s bankruptcy filing in early November set off a tense process surrounding many of the coworking firm’s leases, many of which the company sought to cancel or renegotiate. So far, WeWork has canceled around 70 of those contracts and expects to request more in the coming weeks, Steven Serajeddini, an attorney with Kirkland & Ellis who represents the company, said in a bankruptcy hearing on Monday. Once the biggest private office tenant in Manhattan, the company immediately nixed dozens of leases in New York City upon filing for bankruptcy. Some landlords have objected to the company’s plans to shut down many of its locations. Although in recent weeks, several of them have withdrawn formal objections through court filings.

A Dallas investor is buying another of the office buildings up for grabs with the bankruptcy of a Houston real estate firm, the Dallas Morning News reported. Hartman SPE is selling its office and retail properties as part of a plan to refocus the real estate investment trust on self-storage properties. The unit of Houston’s Silver Star Properties REIT has been in bankruptcy since this summer following a dispute with the company founder. Hartman recently contracted to sell one of its North Dallas high-rises — a 10-story office on North Central Expressway — to retailer Costco which owns the property next door.

WeWork has resolved landlords' objections to its bankruptcy financing agreement, saying on Monday that it had agreed to reserve a portion of any future loans in an account that will be used for rent payments, Reuters reported. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge John Sherwood, who is overseeing the SoftBank-backed company's chapter 11 proceedings, approved the compromise during a court hearing in Newark, New Jersey. The deal allows SoftBank to redirect up to $682.5 million into new credit facilities used to backstop the shared office space provider's rent obligations. SoftBank had already posted the funds as collateral for WeWork's rent costs, but the redirected funds will give SoftBank more flexibility to extend and replace expiring credit agreements, avoiding a scenario in which landlords attempt to collect on the posted collateral. WeWork is not borrowing any new money as part of the approved financing, the company's attorney Ciara Foster said in court. But if it does bring in new money, through a future loan or asset sale, some of the future funds would be reserved to pay landlords, Foster said.

Pennsylvania Real Estate Investment Trust filed for its second bankruptcy in three years, succumbing to the consumer shift away from bricks-and-mortar locations, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. The owner of 16 shopping malls, primarily on the East Coast, filed a chapter 11 petition in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware seeking to implement a restructuring agreement that allows its junior lenders to take control of the company. Under the agreement, junior lenders that are collectively owed more than $700 million will exchange their holdings into a controlling equity interest in the company. Certain of those lenders will provide a new $60 million debtor-in-possession facility to fund the bankruptcy proceedings. Senior lenders owed roughly $400 million will have their claims either repaid in cash or through a new exit loan facility, according to a securities filing. Mario Ventresca, Preit’s chief financial officer, said in a declaration to the court Monday that its previous bankruptcy, filed in 2020, “proved insufficient to address the company’s long-term liquidity needs and persisting macroeconomic challenges.” Ventresca attributed some of the company’s troubles to online shopping and lower consumer spending, due in part to rising inflation and interest rates. Many of Preit’s tenants, including anchors such as JCPenney, commenced their own bankruptcy cases and closed stores at Preit’s properties, he said.

Harbor Custom Development, based in Tacoma, Wash., on Monday announced it has filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, the New Star Tribune reported. The NASDAQ-listed company, known for multifamily housing development in the region and upscale housing development in other parts of the country, said in a news release it had “voluntarily filed for protection under Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code in the Western District of Washington at Tacoma ... to pursue an orderly wind down or restructuring of its business.” It stated that it had filed motions “that will allow it to continue operating in the ordinary course of business while it prepares a reorganization plan to ensure that it can maximize value for the benefit of its creditors.” The company said it would continue “to market and sell finished lots and homes and to operate multi-family projects as they work towards stabilization.” Its filing listed total assets of $223,981,000, and total debts of $172,528,500 as of Sept. 30. A profile of the company online showed 41 employees, while its LinkedIn profile lists “11-50” workers. The company this year has seen management reshuffling, with former CEO Sterling Griffin retiring in July. Interim CEO Jeff Habersetzer, the company’s former chief operating officer, has been at the helm since Griffin’s departure. Its chief financial officer, Lance Brown, resigned in July, with the company announcement noting the departure did “not relate to any disagreement with the company’s management, the board of directors ..., or the company’s independent auditors regarding any matter pertaining to the company’s operations, accounting practices, financial disclosures, internal controls, policies, or practices.” The company abandoned plans for a luxury apartment development in Tacoma over the summer. Griffin blamed a dismal first-quarter earnings report this year partially on “ongoing challenges in the broader housing market, including higher mortgage interest rates and inflationary pressures.”

U.S. officials will take money away from victims of the fraud-tainted crypto firm, FTX Trading Ltd. unless a judge rejects the government’s demand for $24 billion in unpaid taxes, the bankrupt company said in a court filing, Bloomberg News reported. The two sides will be in court today arguing over the best procedures to determine how much of the Internal Revenue Service claim is legitimate. FTX wants to set a quick schedule to estimate the claim; the IRS has argued that its audit is ongoing, so asking a judge to estimate how much FTX might owe in taxes is inappropriate. Going forward with a court-supervised estimation process will show that FTX lost money in the three-years it operated, so it could not possibly owe IRS any substantial amount, the company said in court papers filed Sunday. And any money that it could be forced to pay would harm victims of FTX, the company said. In court papers, federal officials said they would eventually amend the $24 billion claim to reclassify at least some as lower-priority, unsecured debt. “The government is not looking for a windfall, only to determine the correct amount of the tax liabilities,” federal lawyers said in the filing. Last month, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was convicted of orchestrating a massive fraud that led to the collapse of his FTX exchange. The company filed for bankruptcy last year after Bankman-Fried agreed to turn over control of his empire to restructuring professionals. Since then, the advisers have been tracking down assets and trying to untangle a complex web of debt owed to various creditors, including customers who put cash and crypto on the trading platform.

Private-equity firm GPB Capital Holdings, facing civil fraud allegations since early 2021, will be liquidated by a court-appointed receiver, signaling the end of a long wait for roughly 17,000 investors whose capital has been tied up since at least 2018, the Wall Street Journal reported. Chief Judge Margo Brodie of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York put GPB under the control of Joseph Gardemal of Alvarez & Marsal, the firm’s court-appointed monitor since February 2021. As its monitor, Gardemal could veto moves by firm managers but had limited power to do more, and for more than a year he has recommended receivership to expedite the return of investor capital. “We are all looking forward to the prompt return of our invested capital,” said Jay Frederick, an investor in Little Rock, Ark. In early 2021, the Securities and Exchange Commission brought fraud charges against GPB involving around $1.7 billion in investments in what New York’s attorney general described as a “Ponzi-like scheme” that used investor funds to cover promised 8% investment returns. The civil complaint followed criminal indictments against GPB’s founder, a senior executive and the firm’s principal marketer in January 2021.

A potential deal to keep SmileDirectClub Inc. afloat has broken down and the once high-flying tooth straightening startup is shutting down, Bloomberg News reported. The publicly traded company, which filed for bankruptcy in late September, had in recent days been negotiating a deal for its founders to provide fresh capital and buy SmileDirectClub out of chapter 11. But the company failed to get its most important lender and other creditors on board, dooming the effort, attorney Spencer Winters said in bankruptcy court Friday. SmileDirectClub sought bidders for the enterprise over the past two months and found some interest, but all suitors dropped out along the way or submitted unworkable bids. The proposed sale to founders took shape only in recent days, but was conditioned on getting the support of lender HPS Investment Partners and lower-ranking creditors, Winters said. “When it came to the founder-led bid, it was really a Hail Mary,” Winters told U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez. “We pushed very, very hard this week and it just didn’t come together.” SmileDirectClub’s 2019 initial public offering valued the company at $8.9 billion, and made its founders billionaires. It later struggled with declining revenues and never turned a profit. The company ended up marred in a patent fight with a rival, and cut sales and marketing drastically during the pandemic shutdowns.