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Summit Restaurant Holdings, a group of CKE franchisees that operated over 145 Hardee’s restaurants in eight states at its peak, filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Colorado, on Thursday, court records show, RestaurantDive.com reported. Summit Restaurants recently closed 39 stores and said it currently operated 108 in its bankruptcy filings. Summit is a part of Capstone Restaurants, which owns and operates about 226 Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s restaurants, according to its website and court records. In a statement emailed to RestaurantDive.com, CKE said that its “goal is to maintain the maximum number of stores continuing to operate, backed by a capital structure that is sustainable and poised for long-term growth and success, and we are working with all parties to achieve that goal.”

Invacare announced yesterday that it successfully emerged from chapter 11 protection at the end of last week, MassDevice.com reported. Elyria, Ohio-based Invacare began financial restructuring activities that included filing for bankruptcy in February. This saw the company enter into a restructuring support agreement (RSA) that covers substantially all of its debt-holders. That includes its term loan lender, all holders of convertible senior secured notes and holders of a majority of convertible senior unsecured notes. The RSA included a reduction of Invacare’s funded debt by approximately $240 million. It also featured a backstop for a rights offering to holders of claims, providing Invacare with $60 million in equity capital.

A U.S. court of appeals has granted Venezuela a temporary stay, preventing six companies from joining a proposed court auction of shares in a Citgo Petroleum parent to enforce judgments for past expropriation of assets, Reuters reported. Since March, creditors, including a unit of O-I Glass, Huntington Ingalls Industries, ACL1 Investments, Koch Minerals, and mining firms Rusoro Mining and Gold Reserve, have been granted rights to seize shares in the parent of Venezuela-owned refiner Citgo, PDV Holding. The companies had won conditional attachments to a federal case in which the judge has approved a process to auction the shares to pay a $970 million judgment won by miner Crystallex. The six hold arbitration awards or judgments that total about $2.6 billion and wanted those awards to be included in the auction. The appeals court on Friday suspended the attachments until a panel could hear from Venezuela and the six companies to be filed with the court by June. The proposed auction, which could break up the seventh-largest U.S. refiner to pay creditors, took a giant step forward last month with a greenlight from the U.S. Treasury.

Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of collapsed cryptocurrency exchange FTX, has issued his first detailed legal defense since prosecutors accused him of fraud, seeking to dismiss several of the charges and claiming that the high-powered law firm representing FTX in its bankruptcy has been doing the government’s bidding, the New York Times reported. In court filings yesterday, lawyers for Bankman-Fried said FTX and its lawyers at Sullivan & Cromwell had become de facto agents of federal prosecutors building the criminal case against him and might be withholding crucial evidence. “FTX’s legal advisors went to the government to accuse Mr. Bankman-Fried behind his back without knowing the full facts, and ultimately forced him to step down as C.E.O.,” the lawyers wrote. For months, Sullivan & Cromwell has funneled documents and other evidence to the prosecution, the filings say. Mr. Bankman-Fried’s lawyers claimed that prosecutors had been seeking only the most incriminating documents, even though FTX might also be sitting on material that could help the defense. In effect, they argued, prosecutors have been “outsourcing” the legal requirement to provide potentially helpful material to the defense team, shifting that responsibility to a “private party” with no obligation to Mr. Bankman-Fried.

Discount home-goods retailer Christmas Tree Shops filed for chapter 11 on Friday with a plan to emerge from bankruptcy in months with its store base mostly intact, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. The 82-store chain filed bankruptcy aiming to close 10 underperforming locations in bankruptcy and to exit chapter 11 by August, Christmas Tree Shops said. The Middleboro, Mass.-based company has no plans to seek a buyer. Owners Marc and Pam Salkovitz, who are also creditors of the company, plan to retain an ownership stake in the restructured business, Salkovitz said on Friday. “This is strictly a financial restructuring. Our operations are sound,” said Salkovitz, the company’s chairman. Christmas Tree Shops filed for bankruptcy with a $45 million loan, including roughly $20 million in fresh capital, from its lenders to finance it through chapter 11, Salkovitz said. The loan is subject to bankruptcy court approval.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating the conduct of First Republic Bank executives before the government seizure and sale of the lender to JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bloomberg News reported. The SEC is looking into whether any members of the then-executive team of First Republic improperly traded on inside information. It couldn’t immediately be determined which former executives are the focus of the inquiry. No one previously or currently at the bank has been accused of wrongdoing, and the investigation could end without anyone being accused of wrongdoing. First Republic was seized by regulators and sold to JPMorgan on Monday in a government-led deal after a drama-filled weekend. Separately, the SEC has been probing the trading activity of Silicon Valley Bank executives before its collapse in March.

Vice Media is nearing a deal for senior lenders, including Fortress Investment Group and Soros Fund Management, to acquire the troubled media company out of bankruptcy at a valuation of around $400 million, the Wall Street Journal reported. Nearly every Vice stockholder — including backers such as private-equity firm TPG Group, Sixth Street Partners and media mogul James Murdoch — would be wiped out under the proposed reorganization, people familiar with the matter said. Outstanding debts held by TPG and Sixth Street would also be impaired as part of the plan. The planned sale of the company to its lenders would value Vice at around $400 million including debt, a steep drop from its peak valuation of $5.7 billion in 2017. The final purchase price could also change as part of negotiations between the company and the lender group. (Subscription required.)

Some bankrupt companies are turning to a strategy to help them restructure their debt without losing the attractive terms on legacy loans as interest rates rise, often to lenders’ chagrin, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Outpost Pines, a property owner on New York’s Fire Island that sought protection from creditors in February, is asking a bankruptcy judge to approve a plan for it to keep 3% interest on mortgage debt it took out in 2015 so it can avoid paying a 16% default rate on the loan. Others, such as the owners of a 50-story Holiday Inn in Manhattan’s Financial District and of a 41-unit apartment building in New Jersey, in recent months also have sought to keep their legacy rates in bankruptcy. Businesses regularly file for chapter 11 protection to lessen their debt load, usually by retiring old loans and making new ones. As interest rates have climbed, more businesses in financial distress are looking for ways to retain legacy borrowing rates put in place well before the Federal Reserve raised its benchmark rate to between 5% and 5.25%, a 16-year high. The Fed on Wednesday announced a quarter-percentage-point rate increase to reach that level, marking the central bank’s 10th consecutive rate rise aimed at battling inflation.

The judge presiding over crypto exchange FTX’s bankruptcy case has given the green light to a motion allowing the sale of LedgerX, CoinTelegraph.com reported. In a May 4 hearing in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware, Judge John Dorsey approved a motion the FTX debtors filed in April to sell LedgerX to M7 Holdings, an affiliate of Miami International Holdings. FTX said at the time of the purchase agreement that the total proceeds of the transaction would total roughly $50 million. According to lawyers speaking at the hearing, there were no objections to the sale of LedgerX. A representative who spoke on behalf of OKC USA Holding — one of the other bidders for LedgerX — largely did not object to the proceedings but said the firm “reserve[s] all of their rights to seek appropriate relief” relating to a declaration filed by Bruce Mendelsohn, a partner for the FTX debtors’ investment banker. The lawyer claimed Mendelsohn made “not true” statements in regard to OKC’s regulatory obligations to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and the U.S. government.

Before SVB Financial Group bondholders can collect the billions they are owed, the bankrupt company may have to file a claim with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to recover $2 billion worth of deposits trapped by the receivership of Silicon Valley Bank, Bloomberg News reported. That’s because the cash can only be returned to the bank holding company through the receivership process set up after federal regulators seized Silicon Valley Bank, the FDIC argued in court papers on Wednesday. SVB Financial has been sparring with the agency over the $2 billion since filing for bankruptcy in March. The dispute has already bogged down the Chapter 11 case and threatens to pit the bankruptcy process against the receivership process the FDIC uses to repay creditors. “Although the FDIC approved additional funding under the systemic risk exception to protect SVB’s depositors, nothing that has transpired since March 10 altered the debtor-creditor relationship that exists” between the former parent company and the FDIC, lawyers representing the agency wrote in court papers filed on Wednesday.