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The Supreme Court on Monday will consider the Biden administration’s bid to scuttle a $6 billion accord between bankrupt drugmaker Purdue Pharma LP and its billionaire owners, Bloomberg News reported. The deal would protect members of the Sackler family from future opioid lawsuits by way of an oft-used legal mechanism that the high court is now scrutinizing for the first time. If upheld, the settlement would snuff out an inferno of civil lawsuits blaming Purdue’s owners for the company’s aggressive marketing of OxyContin and, in exchange, route billions of dollars to victims, states and communities harmed by the nation’s addiction crisis. The proposal won overwhelming support from opioid crisis victims who voted on it, but there remains a vocal contingent bitterly opposed to letting Purdue’s billionaire owners put the lawsuits behind them. Detractors may get their way because of the challenge from a unit of the Justice Department. At issue is a component of the settlement that forces all opioid victims to give up their claims against the Sacklers even if they’d prefer to take their chances with a jury. Congress authorized similar maneuvers decades ago in bankruptcies related to asbestos lawsuits, and over time, lawyers and bankruptcy courts reasoned that the mandate could be expanded to an array of corporate wrongdoing. Similar deals have ended mass litigation over dangerous products and waves of sex abuse claims against Catholic dioceses, the Boy Scouts of America and USA Gymnastics. They even appear in some mundane acquisitions of bankrupt firms. But federal appeals courts are split over whether the linchpin of these agreements — provisions called nonconsensual third-party releases — are lawful.

Crypto lender Celsius Network may have to seek a new creditor vote on its proposed transformation into a bitcoin-mining business, a U.S. bankruptcy judge said during a court hearing on Thursday, Reuters reported. Celsius said last week that it had reduced its post-bankruptcy business plans to focus only on bitcoin-mining, citing the skepticism of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) about its other planned business lines. Bankruptcy Judge Martin Glenn of New York, who is overseeing Celsius' chapter 11 process, expressed frustration on Thursday about the late pivot, saying that he had been a "broken record" about Celsius's need to reach agreement with the SEC. "This is not the deal that the creditors voted on," Glenn said. The revised deal could face "substantial opposition" from creditors, he said. The SEC did not definitively object to Celsius' bankruptcy plan before it was approved, but Celsius said the agency was unwilling to approve crypto lending and staking activity that the agency has opposed in the past.

A Chilean wind farm operator backed by Latin American Power has filed for bankruptcy in the U.S. with a restructuring deal that would provide financial relief from a debt default due to increased competition and severe drought, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Santiago-based Inversiones Latin America Power filed for chapter 11 Thursday in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan, with more than $400 million of debt. Chief Executive Esteban Moraga said a 2019 move by the Chilean government to phase out coal plants and make the country carbon-neutral by 2050 resulted in a proliferation of new renewable projects, in turn creating a shortage of transmission capacity. Other factors pressuring the company’s finances include volatility in the Chilean energy market due to severe drought conditions, he said in a sworn declaration filed in bankruptcy court. Those conditions have resulted in lower energy-generation at the company’s two wind farms, forcing it to buy energy at significantly higher prices in the spot market to honor customer contracts. That move has hurt cash flow, making the company unable to meet its debt obligations. Earlier this year, Inversiones defaulted on its debt and its credit ratings were lowered, partly due to spot price volatility.

Bankrupt trucking company Yellow is considering an offer to revive the carrier and rehire thousands of its former workers as it weighs competing bids at a court-supervised auction that would disperse its nationwide network of truck terminals to rivals, the Wall Street Journal reported. Sarah Riggs Amico, executive chair of auto-carrier Jack Cooper Transport, is leading a bid that would replace Yellow, which shut down over the summer, with a smaller, leaner trucking company that aims to win back some of the billions of dollars worth of freight business that has shifted to a range of other carriers. The bid faces major hurdles, including persuading the federal government to extend a $700 million loan made to Yellow during the COVID-19 pandemic that is due in 2024. It also comes as Yellow is deep in the process of selling off tens of thousands of trucks and trailers and about 170 North American truck terminals, assets that have been valued at a total of more than $2 billion. Yellow has already begun sending its equipment to liquidators for sale over the coming year, and it has accepted a stalking-horse bid of $1.525 billion from rival trucker Estes Express Lines for its real estate holdings, which are being auctioned this week.

FTX Trading Ltd. won bankruptcy court approval to begin selling its stakes in digital trusts managed by crypto firm Grayscale Investments in order to raise money to repay creditors owed billions of dollars, Bloomberg News reported. FTX plans to sell the assets in a way that maximizes the value and avoids disrupting the market for the digital investments, according to court documents. Grayscale sold investments linked to various digital currencies. The buyers didn’t hold the actual currencies, but instead got shares in trusts that Grayscale put together and managed. FTX’s stakes in the trusts were worth about $744 million as of last month, the company said in court papers. Since FTX filed for bankruptcy last year amid fraud allegations, the company’s advisers have been tracking down assets and trying to untangle a complex web of debts owed to various creditors, including customers who put cash and crypto on the trading platform. FTX’s administrators have so far recovered about $7 billion in assets, including $3.4 billion of crypto, according to court documents.

A prominent Pacific Northwest lobbying and public affairs firm has filed for chapter 11 protection amid a bitter legal dispute between estranged co-owners, the Seattle Times reported. Seattle-based Strategies 360 filed a petition on Monday in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Western District of Washington in an effort to stave off what CEO Ron Dotzauer described in court filings as a hostile and humiliating takeover bid by his former business partner, Eric Sorenson. A legal fight between the two men has been brewing for years over Dotzauer’s failure to pay Sorenson $6 million as part of an agreement to buy out his former 49% ownership stake in the firm, court records show.

The bankruptcy estate of Bed Bath & Beyond has filed the largest-ever lawsuit with the Federal Maritime Commission, seeking around $300 million from Mediterranean Shipping Co. for allegedly overcharging to move its cargo during the pandemic, the Wall Street Journal reported. The bankrupt retailer wants Geneva-based MSC, the world’s largest boxship operator in terms of capacity, to pay around $150 million for damages and an equal sum for what it described as exploitative and coercive behavior. Complaints by American companies are handled by the FMC, the U.S. maritime regulator. Bed Bath & Beyond filed for bankruptcy protection in April, after years of losses. It subsequently closed all of its stores and sold its brand to Overstock.com, which has taken on the Bed Bath & Beyond name. The bankrupt estate changed its legal name to DK Butterfly. The 36-page lawsuit said MSC’s performance in 2021 was “abysmal” and details how the retailer had to pay high freight rates in the spot market to get its goods shipped. It also claims that MSC failed to meet its contractual obligations in terms of pricing along with saddling the retailer with surcharges.

Airline SAS AB is set to complete its U.S. chapter 11 process by June following expected regulatory approvals in Europe, according to Chief Executive Officer Anko van der Werff, Bloomberg News reported. That means the process is going according to plan, the CEO said in an interview on Thursday after posting fourth-quarter earnings that saw its adjusted pretax loss widen 30% year-on-year. The Scandinavian carrier filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in July 2022, and in October reached a $1.2 billion refinancing deal with a group of investors, including Air France-KLM and Castlelake. A bankruptcy court in New York signed off on the financing earlier this month. If SAS was an American company, it would likely have emerged from the chapter 11 process in February, van der Werff said by phone. “But we also have to go through a Swedish reorganization, which we’ll do straight after in February or March, and then we’ll have to wait for regulatory approval from the European Commission. So all in all, I expect it to take until June or so,” the CEO said. The €833 million ($915 million) in Danish and Swedish state aid from 2020 was approved by European Union state-aid watchdogs Wednesday, after an earlier approval was struck down by an EU court. The decision was expected by SAS, van der Werff said, adding that “everything is on track, really” in terms of the regulatory processes.