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Proppant Tech Services LLC began producing frac sand — used for hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to drill in rock — to sell to oil and gas companies or other sand processors in August at a 179-acre sand quarry in south Bexar County, Texas, the San Antonio Express-News reported. The company generated $6 million in revenue in its first six months. However, loans totaling about $8.8 million to Proppant and landowner NA Land Investments LLC ended up in default. The lender, Amarillo National Bank, last month notified the borrowers that it would foreclose on the collateral. The companies’ owners — Anirban “Bon” Haldar, Murray Moran and Ignacio Martinez — had made individual guarantees that the loans would be repaid. Each owns a third of both companies. To avoid losing the assets in foreclosure, Martinez acquired the debt from the bank through his company I.M.Investments LLC. He also owns IPE Aggregate LLC, a New Braunfels-based industrial equipment supplier that provided some of the equipment for Proppant’s operations. He wasn’t acting as a white knight for his partners, however, as he subsequently demanded that they relinquish the collateral and cease all operations and control of Proppant. I.M. Investments even posted the land for next month’s foreclosure auction. Haldar and Moran ignored the request, so I.M. Investments last week sued them in state District Court in San Antonio and obtained a temporary restraining order that bars them operating Proppant. They responded by putting Proppant and NA Land into bankruptcy on June 11.

Drugmaker Mallinckrodt is seeking to postpone or not pay in full the $200 million payment due today to an opioid-victims compensation trust, according to people familiar with the company’s planning, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Mallinckrodt has indicated that it might not make the opioid payment and is in discussions with financial creditors to seek waivers from potential defaults arising from nonpayment, the people said. Friday’s scheduled payment is Mallinckrodt’s second under a $1.7 billion settlement with state and local governments and private plaintiffs who alleged that it played a role in fueling the opioid crisis. The drugmaker has struggled since exiting chapter 11 last year and is now considering a repeat bankruptcy filing to revamp its balance sheet a second time. Mallinckrodt owes $1.25 billion of remaining payments under the opioid plan, which included liability releases for the company and its executives. No final decision on Friday’s payment has been made. Earlier Thursday, the company said in a securities filing it has decided not to pay $56 million in interest payments owed to its secured bondholders. It said it continues to engage with creditors on restructuring proposals they submitted that could be completed in or out of bankruptcy court.

The bankruptcy of a Prime Trust subsidiary is yet another indication that ‘crypto winter’ is a long, long way from thawing, CoinGeek.com reported. On Tuesday, Nevada-based crypto-friendly payment processor Banq Inc filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, citing the “unauthorized” transfers of $17.5 million worth of assets to non-fungible token (NFT) projects set up by a trio of former Banq executives, including its founder and former CEO Scott Purcell. In May 2022, Banq filed a civil suit in federal court against its former execs for having stolen its technology and “significant other value of Banq’s” and used the ill-gotten gains to launch Fortress NFT and Planet NFT. Banq accused the execs of violating non-disclosure agreements and the Nevada Uniform Trade Secrets Act. Banq claimed that in May 2021, then-CEO Purcell abruptly informed Banq shareholders that he was “suspending all sales and marketing efforts … just as [Banq] was beginning to generate revenue.” Purcell said he’d decided to ‘redirect’ Banq’s focus toward NFT wallet technology. In July 2021, Purcell had Banq take out a $3 million loan from Delaware-registered N9 Advisors LLC to further this reorientation.

Cryptocurrency trading platform Bittrex is expected to resume customer withdrawals on June 15 following an order from a judge in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware, Cointelegraph.com reported. The decision does not settle the question of the subordination of U.S. government claims, which had led to objections against its plan. “Objections (if any) to the Motion having been withdrawn, resolved or overruled on the merits,” Judge Brendan Shannon’s June 13 order read. It went on to stipulate that nothing in the motion or the order constituted a finding on whether crypto assets or transactions with them are securities. The order also specified that it does not determine the priority of creditors or prohibit the U.S. from clawing back assets from customers if it is not paid in full. Bittrex’s largest creditor is the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), to which it owes $24 million.

Bed Bath & Beyond’s top lender is preparing for a possible bid for at least some of the bankrupt home-goods retailer’s assets, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Sixth Street Partners is planning to use more than $500 million of its debt in the company to bid, the lender’s lawyer David Hillman said in a bankruptcy-court hearing Wednesday. Sixth Street plans to bid in the form of debt forgiveness in the event that other offers for Bed Bath & Beyond’s assets come up less than what it considers satisfactory. Sixth Street, the retailer’s biggest lender, could seek to acquire the Buybuy Baby chain or all of the retailer’s assets out of bankruptcy. Bed Bath & Beyond has been in talks with Go Global Retail, the owner of children’s apparel retailer Janie and Jack, to acquire Buybuy Baby and keep the chain operating, the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month. Sixth Street replaced JPMorgan Chase, Bed Bath’s former senior lender, and secured the rights as lead creditor to bid using its debt holdings, Hillman said at Wednesday’s hearing. Top lenders have the right to take over the assets of a bankrupt borrower as a way to satisfy their claims. JPMorgan has been paid out in full and is expected to resign as the agent on a prebankruptcy loan by the end of the week, a lawyer representing the lender said in court.

The Rockport Co. said on Thursday that it has filed chapter 11 bankruptcy in a U.S. District Court in Delaware and will put itself up for sale, FootwearNews.com reported. According to the footwear brand, its subsidiaries CB Marathon Midco, LLC, Rockport IP Holdings, LLC, Rockport UK Holdings Ltd. and CB Footwear Services, LLC have also joined in the bankruptcy filing. Rockport said that it’s taking this motion in order to “review and restructure” its assets for the benefit of all stakeholders and to better position the brand for future growth opportunities. As part of the bankruptcy, Rockport said it also intends to file a motion seeking authorization to pursue an auction and sale process. The proposed bidding procedures, if approved by the court, would require interested parties to submit binding offers to acquire Rockport’s assets.

Members of Oklahoma’s billionaire Schusterman family have beaten back a lawsuit alleging that their $7.2 billion sale of Samson Resources to a KKR-led private equity consortium unfairly enriched them to the detriment of the oil-and-gas company’s creditors in bankruptcy, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. A trustee pursuing recoveries for creditors in Samson’s bankruptcy had sued the former owners in 2017, saying the buyers paid twice the company’s fair market value in a 2011 deal. The trustee had alleged that the deal burdened Samson with more debt than it could handle, leading to its bankruptcy in 2015. In a ruling Wednesday, Judge Brendan Shannon in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Del., said the trustee failed to make its case that the subsequent owners overpaid. “The gold standard for determining the value of an asset is to sell it in an open and fair market,” the judge said. “A thing is worth what a willing buyer will pay to a willing seller following a proper marketing process” at arms’ length, with both having reasonable knowledge of relevant facts. Opinions of valuation experts, such as the one that the Samson trustee used, are less reliable than negotiations in determining the fair market value of an asset, he said. Samson took on more than $3 billion in debt as part of the buyout and struggled afterward as oil and gas prices fell.

Tucson, Ariz.-based biotech firm HTG Molecular Diagnostics has filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, with plans to continue operations as it works out a plan to pay its debts, Tucson.com reported. The company, which developed a proprietary platform to rapidly develop molecular drug compounds, plans to exit that business to focus on its own development of new drugs to treat cancer and other diseases, according to bankruptcy filings. In a bankruptcy petition filed June 5 in Delaware, HTG’s corporate domicile, the company listed assets totaling about $6.7 million and debts of about $9 million. HTG, which was founded in 1997 and went public in 2015, was delisted from the Nasdaq Stock Exchange on Thursday. The company's stock has traded as high as $24 per share in the past year but finished at 51 cents on Wednesday. For 2022, HTG posted a net loss of $21.6 million on revenue of $6.4 million.

OncoSec Medical shares were down 55% at 19 cents after the company said in a filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission it was filing for chapter 7 bankruptcy, MarketWatch.com reported. The stock is down 99% in the past 12 months. The company said its sole subsidiary, OncoSec Medical Australia, expects to liquidate and wind down operations under Australian law pursuant to a Creditors' Voluntary Liquidation. OncoSec also said that directors Linda Shi, Robert Arch, Stephany Foster, Joon Kim, H. Kim Lyerly, Kevin Smith and Chao Zhou each tendered their resignations, effective Wednesday, prior to the filing of the bankruptcy petition. Following these resignations, the company will have no members serving on its board of directors. Arch also tendered his resignation as the company's president and chief executive. As a result, the company no longer has any current executive officers.

O’Fallon Brewery this week filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, as the company’s cash flow has yet to recover to pre-pandemic levels and its interest rates have more than doubled in the past nine months, according to its attorney, the St. Louis Business Journal reported. The petition, made under the name Sugar Creek Acquisition, was filed Monday in bankruptcy court in St. Louis, listing assets of $1 million to $10 million and liabilities of $1 million to $10 million. The filing said the business, the fourth-largest brewer in the region by beer barrels produced, had sales of $4.5 million last year. The Maryland Heights, Mo.-based brewer, which operates at 45 Progress Parkway, a property owned by Salt Creek Holdings LLC, plans to remain open as it reconfigures its finances, according to Spencer Desai of Desai Law Firm, an attorney for O’Fallon Brewery Chief Executive Jim Gorczyca. That’s partly because the company has “more value as a going concern,” or a company with the resources needed to continuing operating, than it would if it closed, Desai said. The brewery, which was founded in 2000, has been having cash flow and financial troubles stemming from high interest rates and hasn’t fully recovered from the pandemic, according to Desai. O’Fallon Brewery has a $5 million loan from the Small Business Administration with a variable interest rate component, which has caused the company’s interest rate to have “literally doubled” from about 5% to almost 11% in the past nine months, Desai said. “That put a huge cash flow strain on them."