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Jewelry maker Alex and Ani LLC, which operates dozens of stores, filed for chapter 11 protection yesterday, Bloomberg News reported. The Rhode Island-based jewelery company sells wares like charm bracelets and necklaces and was founded in 2004 by Carolyn Rafaelian. It opened its first store in the state in 2009 and has since expanded locations spanning the United States, Aruba and Panama. Alex and Ani’s filing in Delaware listed assets and liabilities of $100 million to $500 million each. Mall owners Simon Property Group Inc. and Brookfield Property Partners LP are among its largest unsecured creditors; each are owed more than $3 million in rent payments. The filing comes nearly two years after the firm sued Bank of America Corp. for more than $1 billion, in a lawsuit which accused the bank of fraudulently declaring Alex and Ani in default of a $50 million line of credit and of driving it toward bankruptcy. The bank said it strongly disagreed with the allegations at the time. That case was later dropped in August 2019.

An urgent fundraising appeal late last year had appeared to save Judson College, but declining enrollment and wary creditors sealed the historic school’s fate. After 183 years of operation, the Baptist-affiliated college will file for bankruptcy protection and will not reopen for the fall semester, BaptistNews.com reported. College trustees made what they called a “heartbreaking” decision May 6, two days after one of the school’s creditors called the note on a loan that could not be repaid. Additionally, only 12 new students had enrolled for the fall 2021 semester, officials said, adding to the woes of declining enrollment for the all-female school located in Marion, Ala. In April, trustees had approved a 2021-2022 budget, based on confidence the board and administration had in support of “new significant donors to help close the college’s operating deficit,” a school news release explained. In December 2020, Judson officials issued an urgent appeal to donors, explaining the school needed to raise $1.5 million in gifts and pledges to remain open for the spring 2021 semester. President Mark Tew wrote a one-page letter outlining the school’s dire financial situation. He said the school must obtain $500,000 in donations by Dec. 31 and another $1 million in unrestricted pledges to be fulfilled between Jan. 1 and May 31, 2021. By the start of 2021, that appeal appeared to have been successful. The college reported that donors gave $27,665 more than the $500,000 required by year-end and made $584,065 in pledges toward the $1 million needed by May 31. Plans were laid for a full academic year beginning in fall 2021. Inside Higher Education reported that the college raised more than $2.53 million in the academic year just ended.

The Collected Group filed for bankruptcy protection Monday to cement a rescue plan backed by the private-equity firm that controls it, KKR & Co., WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. The Chino, Calif.-based company is the design, distribution and retail force behind the Joie, Current/Elliott and Equipment fashion labels. The private-equity giant is Collected’s largest owner and secured lender, and is backing a turnaround plan that would leave landlords and other unsecured creditors that are owed an estimated $35.5 million unpaid, according to bankruptcy court papers. Collected already has vacated its retail stores and is hoping to wrap up its bankruptcy reorganization in the next six weeks, court papers say. The fashion company is one of many that already was struggling when COVID-19 laid waste to the retail sector. Efforts to find a buyer for the brands stalled in the spring of 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic hit, battering Collected’s finances. At the time, the company was getting back on its feet from a crippling software issue that impaired its ability to ship orders for months in 2017. Pandemic-driven mall closures left Collected with only three Joie stores in operation, in Newport Beach, Calif.; Greenwich, Conn.; and Boston. Efforts to sell the brands restarted this year, as did talks with landlords, but Collected was out of cash and unable to reach deals with anyone but its secured lenders. KKR and Callodine Commercial Finance LLC are Collected’s secured lenders, owed an aggregate of more than $185 million, court papers said.

One of Nebraska's well-known golf clubs has filed for bankruptcy, but its owner says things are business as usual and the club is in no danger of closing, the Lincoln Journal Star reported. Dismal River Holdings LLC, which owns the Dismal River Golf Club near Mullen, filed chapter 11 bankruptcy in January. The filing came shortly after notices of a foreclosure sale were posted in the Hooker County Tribune. The club has two 18-hole courses, the White Course designed by Jack Nicklaus and Red Course by Tom Doak. Joel Jacobs, who bought the Dismal River club in 2017, also filed chapter 11 bankruptcy petitions for affiliated companies J. Jacobs Co., HC Land Co. and DRC III. J. Jacobs Co., DRC III and Dismal River Holdings all listed both assets and liabilities between $10 million and $50 million. HC Land Co. listed assets and liabilities between $1 million and $10 million.

Electricity retailer Entrust Energy Inc. sought chapter 11 protection Tuesday as the latest corporate bankruptcy stemming from last month’s extreme weather events in Texas, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Entrust’s chapter 11 papers listed a disputed $270 million bill from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the grid operator at the center of the state’s energy crisis. Houston-based Entrust is among many municipal utilities, electric cooperatives and electricity retailers facing huge bills from Ercot for power they bought at vastly elevated prices during the cold snap in Texas last month. Brazos Electric Power Cooperative Inc., the state’s largest energy cooperative, was the first to file for chapter 11 after being overwhelmed with invoices. Energy retailers Just Energy Group Inc., Griddy Energy LLC and Brilliant Energy LLC also declared bankruptcy. Others have indicated they are in financial distress, are disputing the bills or need to borrow to pay Ercot, which allowed electricity prices to soar to the maximum level of $9,000 per megawatt hour, compared with the average price of roughly $22 last year, in an effort to get power generators to supply power amid widespread blackouts and equipment failures. Ercot cut off Entrust from the state power market after the company failed to make required payments and transferred its customers elsewhere, according to an Ercot notice. Rhythm, a renewable energy provider, said earlier this month it had acquired Entrust’s Texas customers as well as those of another retailer, Power of Texas Holdings Inc. totaling 40,000 residential and 10,000 commercial users.

Plastics recycler CarbonLite and its subsidiary PinnPack Packaging have filed for chapter 11 protection, Plastics in Packaging reported. Production at all three of U.S.-based CarbonLite’s facilities — in California, Texas and Pennsylvania — and its Californian thermoforming business PinnPack Packaging, will continue as usual without interruption, as will payment of all employees. Layoffs are not under consideration. There will be no stoppage of supply to CarbonLite’s customers during the reorganisation period. Pressures directly related to the coronavirus pandemic contributed to CarbonLite’s decision to reorganize. This included temporary production slow-downs caused by employee illness, the low price of virgin plastics relative to recycled PET, and a nine-month delay in the opening of the company’s new Pennsylvania facility caused by travel restrictions that held up equipment commissioning by European manufacturers. CarbonLite has also incurred heavy capital expenditures for the recent expansion of its Dallas facility and construction of its 270,000 square foot plant in Reading, Pa., which launched limited production in October 2020. This plant is outfitted with advanced robotic systems and is the largest standalone bottle-to-bottle recycling facility in the world. Its opening is planned for this spring.

Private equity-owned stationary and gifts retailer Paper Source Inc. filed for bankruptcy, planning to permanently close some stores and sell itself to an affiliate of asset manager Apollo Global Management Inc. in exchange for debt relief, subject to better offers, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Chicago-based Paper Source filed for chapter 11 protection Tuesday in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Richmond, Va., becoming the latest retail chain pushed into bankruptcy as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Paper Source said its business was strong and growing until it was forced to temporarily close all of its nearly 160 stores last March in response to COVID-19. Revenue then dropped from canceled weddings and lost sales during the Mother’s Day and Easter holidays. The company closed stores weeks after Paper Source acquired additional locations from a competitor, Papyrus Inc., which itself was in chapter 11 at the time.

Video streaming company MobiTV Inc. filed for bankruptcy protection, and plans to look for a buyer while staying afloat with a $15.5 million loan from T-Mobile US Inc., WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. The Emeryville, Calif.-based software company entered chapter 11 proceedings in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Del., with total assets of $19 million and liabilities of $75 million. The company’s roughly $25 million in secured debt is owed mostly to Ally Financial Inc., but T-Mobile also became a secured lender in recent months, providing MobiTV with roughly $5 million in bridge financing, according to court documents filed yesterday. MobiTV’s unsecured debts include about $9 million owed to bondholders, $15 million to trade creditors and $3 million under the federal Paycheck Protection Program. Major shareholders include Oak Investment Partners, which owns 44% of the common stock. Smaller equity owners include Hearst Communications Inc. and the U.S. Small Business Administration, records showed. As recently as 2019, MobiTV received $50 million in new funding from backers including Oak. MobiTV holds key contracts with T-Mobile and more than 120 cable and broadband TV providers to deliver streaming content to more than 300,000 subscribers.