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Valeant Pharmaceuticals International Inc. agreed to sell about $2.1 billion in assets in two deals, an important first step in the struggling drugmaker’s endeavor to get cash and begin easing its debt burden, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. L’Oreal SA, the Paris-based cosmetic giant, will pay Valeant $1.3 billion for three skin-care brands, according to a statement Tuesday. Valeant will also sell its Dendreon Pharmaceuticals unit to closely held Chinese conglomerate Sanpower Group Co. for about $820 million. The agreements mark Valeant’s biggest divestitures in almost three years, and a start to its efforts to pay down about $30 billion in debt. It’s a significant break for Chief Executive Officer Joe Papa, who took over in May to help turn around a company that had been embroiled in scandals about high prices and accounting that led to legal and regulatory investigations -- along with declines in its share price.

The combination of rising rates and a new political regime in the U.S. will bring about an uptick in corporate restructurings outside the energy space, creating new opportunities for investors in the riskiest parts of the debt market, Bloomberg News reported on Friday. That’s one of the conclusions from interviews with bond traders, bankruptcy lawyers, financial advisers and fixed-income analysts about the outlook for 2017. Investment options will become more diversified as the primarily energy-driven distressed market of recent years will broaden out, according to Tim Coleman, head of restructuring at PJT Partners Inc. Sectors to watch could include utilities, health care providers and more companies in the struggling brick-and-mortar retail sector. “We’re going to see more ordinary restructurings instead of just a lot of commodity-driven activity,” said Coleman, who has worked on major corporate restructurings including Ford Motor Co. and Delta Airlines Inc. “That’s probably better for the distressed space.” Restructurings will happen in certain pockets of pain where the broader economic trends exacerbate existing problems and “weed out very quickly those companies that have borrowed too much,” according to Mike Barnes, co-chief investment officer at Tricadia Capital Management, which oversees $2.8 billion.

North Philadelphia Health System (NPHS), which stopped paying numerous vendors in 2015 and then closed St. Joseph's Hospital last March after state officials halted a long-running subsidy, filed for bankruptcy protection late last week in Philadelphia, Philly.com reported. NPHS said that it will continue to provide drug and alcohol services and psychiatric care at Girard Medical Center, at Eighth Street and Girard Avenue. The tax-exempt organization said it owed $24.8 million to its 30 largest unsecured creditors. Independence Blue Cross topped the list, with $10.87 million owed for employee benefits.

A federal bankruptcy court judge has approved the sale of Stokes County’s (N.C.) hospital and other medical facilities for $400,000 to a for-profit organization with limited experience running hospitals, the Winston-Salem Journal reported today. An affiliate of LifeBrite Hospital Group LLC of Lilburn, Ga., has been running the Stokes facilities since July 9 — three days before the Stokes Board of Commissioners said it would stop paying for the hospital’s financial commitments. Commissioners agreed to transfer the lease for the medical facilities to Life-Brite. LifeBrite has agreed to takeover $1.3 million in Medicare and Medicaid payment obligations from for-profit Pioneer Health Services, which filed for chapter 11 protection on March 31. Pioneer entered bankruptcy with seven other hospitals under its umbrella in Georgia, Mississippi, Tennessee and Virginia. The Stokes medical facilities altogether have about 200 employees. The court set a closing date of Jan. 31 for the Stokes transaction. Read more. 

For more on hospital and health care insolvencies, be sure to pick up a copy of the ABI Health Care Insolvency Manual, Third Edition from the ABI Bookstore. 

Marshalltown, Iowa’s, struggling hospital has filed for bankruptcy protection from creditors as it reorganizes for a sale, the Associated Press reported yesterday. Central Iowa Healthcare asked the court in its Tuesday bankruptcy filing to approve a plan to sell substantially all of its assets to UnityPoint Health–Waterloo, an affiliate of UnityPoint Health. Under the bankruptcy plan, all of Central Iowa’s operations would operate without interruption. The operations include the 49-bed hospital, emergency department, primary care clinics in Conrad, Marshalltown, State Center and Tama-Toledo, and its outpatient center.

Leaders of Dallas’s Forest Park Medical Center face criminal charges after federal prosecutors said they paid roughly $40 million worth of bribes and kickbacks to health-care professionals who agreed to send patients to the high-end hospital, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday. A federal grand jury indicted Forest Park Medical executives of paying surgeons, primary-care doctors, chiropractors and others for patient referrals. Prosecutors say the bribes also included sporting event tickets, custom cowboy boots, free carwashes and deals on medical office building space, according to the newly unsealed 44-page document filed in U.S. District Court in Dallas. Prosecutors said the bribes brought business into Forest Park Medical Center, enabling it to bill medical insurers and government-administered health care programs like Medicare for more than $500 million between the facility’s 2009 opening and 2013, according to the indictment. After years of declining revenue, the hospital shut down in October 2015. It was sold out of bankruptcy to another hospital operator earlier this year. Read more. (Subscription required.) 

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.