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Bankrupt fashion company Nine West Holdings Inc. has asked investment bank Lazard Ltd. to help it explore a sale, a month after its namesake brand known for its footwear and handbags fetched $340 million in an auction, Reuters reported. The sale of the Nine West brand, for $140 million more than the first offer, has emboldened the company to seek an outright sale for its remaining assets which include its jeanswear and jewelry businesses, and the Anne Klein and Kasper women’s’ brands. Some creditors had planned to convert their debt to equity in the remaining business. Nine West is also considering selling the businesses piecemeal. Nine West’s jeanswear and jewelry businesses, together with Anne Klein and Kasper, had net revenues of $1.1 billion in 2017, according to bankruptcy court documents. The jeanswear line includes Gloria Vanderbilt jeans sold in Costco Wholesale Corp., Kohls Corp. and Sears Holdings Corp. Brand licensor Authentic Brands Group LLC completed the acquisition of the Nine West brand this month after beating shoe retailer DSW Inc. in an auction.

Oaktree Capital Management LP, which has been an unhappy junior bondholder in the bankruptcy of Claire’s Stores Inc., said Thursday that the teen retailer’s rush to leave chapter 11 runs the risk of leaving a better offer on the table, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. For months Oaktree has said Claire’s continues to favor senior bondholders and private-equity owner Apollo Management Holdings LP at the expense of other parties. In a court filing on Thursday, Oaktree, which holds 72 percent of secured second-lien bonds in the Hoffman Estates, Ill.-based company, lodged numerous objections related to the disclosure statement Claire’s filed last week in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Del.

Some investors in funds managed by Dubai-based Abraaj want to block the sale of assets to Colony Capital pending a review of Abraaj’s handling of funds, according to a report seen by Reuters, potentially delaying a deal key to the survival of the investment management business. U.S.-based Colony offered last month to buy the fund management unit that runs Abraaj’s Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa and Turkey funds after months of turmoil at Abraaj triggered by a dispute with investors over the use of their money in a $1 billion healthcare fund. Abraaj denies any wrongdoing, but the row has weighed heavily on the Middle East and Africa’s largest private equity firm, which filed for provisional liquidation in the Cayman Islands last month. A review of Abraaj’s handling of investor money is likely to delay the Colony transaction, according to a report by Abraaj Holdings’ provisional liquidators, PwC.

A holding company owned by Bryan Goldberg, the founder of the websites Bleacher Report and Bustle, has been picked as the successful bidder for the assets of former media gossip site Gawker, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. An auction for Gawker was held yesterday in the Manhattan offices of Ropes & Gray LLP, the law firm that has represented Gawker’s former publisher as it has been liquidating in bankruptcy over the last two years. Goldberg placed a high bid of $1.35 million, one of these people said. The assets for sale include the Gawker domain, social media accounts and nearly 200,000 of its published articles. Goldberg, 35 years old, outbid Mineola, N.Y.-based marketing firm Didit Inc., whose $1.13 million offer had led the bidding for the blog, these people said. He said that “there are no firm plans in place at the moment” for Gawker going forward and said he didn’t expect that to change before the end of the year.

Victims of the Rick Siskey Ponzi scheme are finally expected to receive their first payments under a plan a federal bankruptcy court approved this week to partially reimburse them, the Charlotte Observer reported. The $10 million in total payouts come from insurance proceeds Siskey's widow, Diane, received following the death of her husband, who took his life in 2016 after court filings revealed he was under investigation for fraud. The disbursements will cover more than 100 investors, some of whom entrusted Siskey with hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece, according to court filings. The payments represent about 28 percent of each investor's "base claim." Original bankruptcy claims in the case reached about $50 million. But base claims, which exclude promised returns as well as money investors already got back, are about $40 million. Read more.

For a further analysis of commercial fraud, make sure to pick up a copy of ABI’s Fraud and Forensics: Piercing Through the Deception in a Commercial Fraud Case. 

A federal bankruptcy judge issued a restraining order yesterday to block the firm of Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for porn star Stormy Daniels, from spending any fees it collects while it owes more than $10 million in unpaid debts and back taxes, the Los Angeles Times reported. The move by Judge Catherine Bauer of U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Santa Ana was a severe blow to Avenatti, whose personal financial troubles have deepened as his star has risen on cable news. Bauer’s order covers fees from 54 court cases, including the suit that Daniels filed against President Trump to void the nondisclosure pact that bars her from talking about their alleged 2006 sexual encounter. His Newport Beach, Calif.-based firm, Eagan Avenatti, emerged from chapter 11 protection in March after reaching agreements to pay its creditors. But Avenatti soon broke his promise that the firm would meet a May deadline to pay the Internal Revenue Service $440,291 in back taxes, penalties and interest. The firm also missed a $2-million payment, personally guaranteed by Avenatti, to Jason Frank, a lawyer who used to work there. As a result, Frank won a $10-million judgment against Eagan Avenatti.

A judge approved a discounted sale of Harvey Weinstein’s bankrupt film and television studio to private-equity firm Lantern Capital Partners yesterday, allowing it to close a deal that has been pending for more than two months, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Lantern will pay $289 million, shaving $21 million from the original purchase price for Weinstein Co. following a dispute over costs tied to completing the deal and assuming the entertainment company’s contracts including participation agreements with actors, writers and producers. The transaction is anticipated to close Friday. The revised sale was approved following a settlement over the purchase price between Weinstein Co., Lantern and a committee representing trade creditors and women who have filed lawsuits against the company over alleged misconduct by Weinstein. Before the settlement, Lantern and Weinstein Co. had sought to reduce the price by $23 million.

A year after going public with the backing of venture-capital firms, cloud-storage business Tintri Inc. filed for bankruptcy protection yesterday and put its business up for sale, immediately drawing a bid from a data-storage supplier, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. The chapter 11 filing in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Del., comes after the Mountain View, Calif.-based company said that it was running out of cash and might be forced to stop operating and file for bankruptcy even if its lenders didn’t pressure it to repay its debt. The Silicon Valley business, whose customers include Toyota, Comcast and Sony, had revenue of more than $125 million last year but couldn’t turn a profit. The company posted annual losses of more than $100 million in each of the past three years.

Seven years after residents of the small, low-income Butler County, Pa., community called the Woodlands became convinced that Rex Energy’s shale drilling had ruined their water wells, the company spent $159,000 to settle their claims, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported. State College, Pa.-based Rex Energy Corp. paid the money in April to end lawsuits brought by nine Woodlands families who said they watched as their water turned black or orange or stopped flowing altogether right around the time that Rex was ramping up its drilling and fracking in the area. As with nearly all such settlements, both the amounts and the details of the cases were kept under wraps by strict nondisclosure clauses. But when Rex filed for bankruptcy in May, it had to disclose all of its spending for more than a year preceding the filing. In those documents, Rex revealed that it paid the Woodlands families between $16,250 and $27,125 each.

Bankrupt FirstEnergy Solutions plans to sell $140 million of retail and wholesale contracts to Exelon Generation Co., Akron Beacon Journal reported. The deal, initially agreed to on Monday, is part of FirstEnergy Solution’s chapter 11 proceedings in U.S. Bankruptcy Court and is subject to court approval. According to a federal regulatory filing from Exelon, FirstEnergy Solutions will assign all of its retail electricity and wholesale load serving contracts and other related commodity contracts to Exelon Generation for a $140 million cash purchase price. The process calls for the assets to be put up for a proposed auction on Sept. 6, according to a court filing. The deal is expected to close by the end of the year, according to Exelon’s filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The deal can be terminated by either party if it is not consummated by Dec. 31.