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Jack Cooper Transport, a specialized operator that hauls automobiles for carmakers, plans to submit a bid backed by $1 billion in financing and support from the Teamsters union and some U.S. lawmakers that would halt the liquidation of trucking giant Yellow and seek to resurrect the shuttered business, the Wall Street Journal reported. The improbable effort would require the Treasury Department to defer repayment for several years of a $700 million loan provided to Yellow under a COVID pandemic-era bailout, one of several debts that helped push one of the country’s biggest truckers into collapse earlier this year. The Jack Cooper Transport bid would provide about $1 billion to pay off other secured creditors, offer unsecured creditors shares in the business and hire back some of the 22,000 Teamsters members that lost their jobs when the company shut down over the summer, according to the people familiar with the matter. It would restore operations under a new, leaner company and seek to win back freight business that has dispersed to other carriers. The effort comes as the sale of Yellow’s sprawling network of trucking terminals and tens of thousands of trucks and trailers is moving through U.S. Bankruptcy Court. The bankruptcy process has a deadline Thursday for submission of bids for real-estate assets, with a minimum of $1.525 billion already set for the land and buildings ahead of an auction scheduled for Nov. 28. That would be enough to repay the company’s secured creditors, including the $700 million federal loan, and to cover wages and other payments owed to laid off workers.

Swedish truck manufacturer Volvo announced Friday today that it was successful in its $210 million bid in an auction for the battery business of financially troubled Proterra in the U.S., Investing.com reported. This auction was conducted as part of Proterra's ongoing chapter 11 bankruptcy protection proceedings. “We entered into the Chapter 11 process with a mission to maximize the potential of each of our product lines. Today, we have taken an important step towards that goal for our Proterra Powered business,” said Proterra CEO, Gareth Joyce. Volvo expressed its intention to conclude the acquisition early next year, subject to approval by the bankruptcy court.

Anagram, Party City’s balloon-manufacturing subsidiary, filed for bankruptcy with a deal to hand over ownership to a group of bondholders after its parent company rejected its supply contract, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. The credit bid by Anagram bondholders, which would extinguish a large portion of the company’s debt, is subject to higher and better offers in an auction supervised by the bankruptcy court. Anagram, which has a separate board and employees from Party City, has come under pressure from the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, helium shortages, a liquidity crunch because of cash distributions to its parent company and Party City’s recent move to reject its supply contract, according to a court filing made by its chief restructuring officer, Adrian Frankum. Party City itself filed for bankruptcy in January, emerging from it last month. It kept its balloon-making division out of chapter 11 because the retailer had separated its own debt from the debt of the subsidiary in a 2020 debt exchange. Eden Prairie, Minn.-based Anagram has lined up a $22 million debtor-in-financing loan from the bondholder group that has proposed to take over the unit.

Congressional pressure is growing on the U.S. Treasury to help salvage trucking giant Yellow from bankruptcy, from Republicans and Democrats alike, letters viewed by Reuters show. Republican Senator Josh Hawley is the latest lawmaker to ask Treasury, in a letter on Thursday, to extend the terms of a controversial $700 billion pandemic loan granted by the Trump administration to Yellow. It follows separate letters sent by Republican Senator Roger Marshall and Democrats Sherrod Brown and Bob Casey last month. Earlier this week, Democratic senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey sent letters. Republicans and Democrats pushing Treasury could benefit Jack Cooper, one the largest U.S. privately owned auto transport companies, making its long-shot bid to rescue Yellow from bankruptcy liquidation more likely. Key to Jack Cooper's bid is convincing Treasury to extend the loan currently due at the end of September 2024 to the same time in 2026, allowing Jack Cooper to offer more favorable terms for Yellow.

WeWork Inc. never figured out how to make money. Former company CEO Adam Neumann did, Bloomberg News reported. The office-leasing business declared bankruptcy this week, two years after finally going public minus its infamous co-founder. It has $19 billion of liabilities and $15 billion of assets. Longtime investors, including Softbank Group Corp. and the Vision Fund, will add to the enormous losses they’ve already taken on the venture. “It has been challenging for me to watch from the sidelines as WeWork has failed to take advantage of a product that is more relevant today than ever before,” Neumann said in a statement. But a part of Neumann might be thankful he was forced out in 2019 following the company’s disastrous first attempt at an initial public offering. While battering his reputation, the exit left him with plenty of liquidity, and he’s still worth $1.7 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. To be sure, WeWork’s failure hurt Neumann’s wealth. When it went public in a merger with a special purpose acquisition company in 2021, Neumann had a fortune of $2.3 billion, according to the index, with nearly one-third in WeWork shares. They’ve since fallen more than 99%. But the deal also revealed how he managed to extract huge amounts of cash from WeWork in better times. The ex-CEO’s name was mentioned 197 times in a merger filing alongside eye-popping payouts, including a $185 million non-compete agreement, $106 million settlement payment and $578 million received for shares sold by Neumann’s We Holdings to SoftBank.

In its heyday a few years ago, WeWork said that it would reinvent offices. But the company never created a sustainable business or changed how most people worked, the New York Times reported. The business of offering flexible office space on short leases to individuals and businesses, a model that WeWork hoped to make mainstream, remains a niche in commercial real estate despite the billions of dollars the company and others invested in the approach. Flexible office space accounts for less than 2 percent of all office space in the 20 largest U.S. markets, according to Cushman & Wakefield, close to its share before the pandemic. WeWork filed for bankruptcy protection this week in an effort to quickly slim down its portfolio of office spaces. The company wants to give up over 70 leases right away, with possibly more to follow. Other co-working companies may take over some of those locations, but some owners of office buildings said they were not expecting this approach to ever amount to more than a small part of their business. Many employers are paring back their office space because workers aren’t going in five days a week after growing accustomed to working remotely or on a hybrid schedule. Office vacancies are at their highest level in decades, with lots of space available for sublet often at a deep discount from the rents that prevailed before the pandemic. WeWork’s bankruptcy will only make the situation worse by leaving landlords with more space to fill.

The Canastra family, owners of New Bedford’s (Mass.) seafood auction, closed a deal to buy out groundfish giant Blue Harvest Fisheries from bankruptcy, a move finalized Wednesday with the approval of a federal judge, the New Bedford Light reported. After a short bidding war, Cassie Canastra submitted the highest bid of $12 million on Monday, beating out the second-highest bid from O’Hara Corporation, which is a part owner of New Bedford-based Eastern Fisheries, by $750,000. The sale includes “all the vessels, all the permits” that once belonged to Blue Harvest Fisheries. It includes eight vessels and 48 state and federal fishing permits, representing about 13% of all Northeast groundfish permits or about 250 million pounds of quota for the current fishing year. The sale marks the final chapter in the saga of Blue Harvest Fisheries, which was founded in 2015 by the Dutch billionaire Brenninkmeijer family, through their Manhattan-based private equity firm. The company quickly expanded to become the single-largest groundfish company on the East Coast before declaring bankruptcy in September and liquidating its assets.

A Fort Collins, Colo.-based homebuilder facing a number of lawsuits has filed for chapter 7 bankruptcy, BusinessDen.com reported. Bluestone Homes of Colorado, which lists a Fort Collins P.O. box as its address, filed for bankruptcy Oct. 31. Terence Hoaglund founded Bluestone in 2009. According to its website, it designs and builds energy-efficient homes, with long-term goals of building “net-zero-energy homes.” In court filings, Bluestone Homes listed assets of $171,876 and said it owes $2.4 million to 52 creditors, including contractors and customers who put down deposits. Hoaglund, who signed the filings, claimed he is owed $43,405 for paying company debts on personal credit cards. The filings show revenue has dropped this year compared to years past. From January to the Oct. 31 filing date, Bluestone reported a loss of $528,000 on $780,000 in revenue. That compares to $2.7 million revenue reported last year and $6.4 million reported in 2021.

WeWork will make its first U.S. bankruptcy court appearance today, seeking to advance a restructuring proposal that could cut $3 billion in debt and shrink the company's real estate footprint, Reuters reported. The Softbank-backed office space-sharing company filed for bankruptcy protection in Newark, N.J., bankruptcy court on Monday, seeking to address more than $4 billion in debt and unsustainable rent costs. WeWork, once valued at $47 billion, expanded at breakneck speed but racked up steep losses on its long-term lease obligations after a post-COVID plunge in demand for office space. After an earlier effort to restructure its debts failed to stave off bankruptcy, WeWork reached a restructuring agreement with over 90% of its bondholders to convert $3 billion of debt into equity in the company. Softbank, which currently owns about 70% of the company, would retain an equity stake under the proposed restructuring. WeWork managed to renegotiate 590 leases before filing for bankruptcy, saving about $12.7 billion in future rent payments. But it says it has more work to do to get rent costs under control. The company has identified 69 leases it intends to break in the initial days of its bankruptcy, including 41 in New York City, and it could seek to reject additional leases later in its bankruptcy. WeWork said it is seeking to renegotiate terms on other leases with 400 landlords.
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In related news, WeWork's $3 billion debt for equity swap deal with its creditors marks the latest effort by top shareholder SoftBank to revive the troubled office-space provider and recoup some of the billions it has invested, Reuters reported. Whether the bet succeeds now depends on WeWork renegotiating the costly long-term leases it signed during the boom years and is now unable to pay, forcing it to file for bankruptcy on Monday. WeWork's long-term lease obligations of $13.3 billion accounted for more than 70% of its total debt as of end-June. Those deals, many agreed during a period of breakneck growth under founder Adam Neumann, became a crippling burden as the post-COVID shift towards working from home led to a plunge in demand for office space. Neumann quit as CEO in 2019, bowing to pressure from some investors. WeWork renegotiated some of its leases to reduce its obligations by more than $2 billion since the end of 2022. Read more.

Sam Bankman-Fried’s criminal fraud conviction came just as the FTX implosion was approaching its first anniversary. But for others who helped promote the cryptocurrency exchange, the legal fallout will continue for years, Bloomberg News reported. Attention now turns to a sweeping class-action suit in Miami federal court by investors who claim they lost billions in the collapse of FTX and seek to pin blame not just on Bankman-Fried and his inner circle, but also on celebrities who were paid to endorse it to the masses, as well as bankers, accountants and lawyers who propped up the empire’s legitimacy. Flashy advertisements featuring Larry David and Tom Brady touting FTX were among the very first bits of evidence shown to the jury at the start of a monthlong trial in Manhattan that culminated in Bankman-Fried being found guilty last week of seven counts of fraud and conspiracy. The class action, which seeks to cover hundreds of thousands of investors, alleges that celebrity endorsers and firms that provided financial and legal services to FTX would have seen red flags about the business if they had done proper due diligence. The Miami case seeks unspecified damages for the $8 billion that FTX allegedly “stole” from investors — and most of which “vanished.” The guilty verdict for Bankman-Fried doesn’t directly establish a central contention in the class action — that dozens of celebrities and other alleged enablers should have known he was up to no good when they signed on as advisers or brand ambassadors. But the 31-year-old’s conviction for what Manhattan’s top federal prosecutor Damian Williams called “one of the biggest financial frauds in American history” will add momentum to the investors’ case, according to Daniel Richman, a professor at Columbia Law School.