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The co-founder of Apollo Global Management, Marc Rowan, resigned from the board of Caesars Entertainment Corp.’s operating unit after an investigation found that he had led a deal that was undervalued and shortchanged the now-bankrupt unit, Reuters reported yesterday. The disclosure was made in court documents filed on Monday in bankruptcy court in Chicago. The documents did not say why the billionaire investor resigned. The bankrupt unit is negotiating a settlement over several deals, including the one led by Rowan, that creditors allege stripped the unit's best casinos and left behind unsustainable debt. Rowan remains on the board of the parent, which may have to contribute billions of dollars to a restructuring plan to avoid litigation over the deals. Read more. 

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The federal judge who presided over some of the complex legal battles that arose following the collapse of Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme got a new messy dispute to untangle — bondholders versus Caesars Entertainment, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday. Judge Jed Rakoff has been reassigned the four bondholder lawsuits now pending against Caesars in a Manhattan district court, court records show. The reassignment follows the news that Judge Shira A. Scheindlin, who had previously overseen the litigation, will retire April 29, just days before a trial on two of the suits was scheduled to begin.

The cost of the Caesars Entertainment Operating Co. bankruptcy investigation that dug up as much as $5.1 billion in potential legal claims has topped $40 million and is still climbing, the Wall Street Journal reported today. New bankruptcy court filings show examiner Richard J. Davis and his team charged nearly $25 million for work performed as the probe into CEOC’s dealings with its parent company heated up. The new round of bills brings the total cost of the investigation, launched in March 2015, up to $41.8 million. The cost of the court-ordered probe, borne by CEOC, is expected to climb further, as the latest bills only cover work performed between Oct. 1 and Jan. 31. A report on the investigation’s findings was released on March 15. That report concluded that Caesars Entertainment Corp. and its private-equity owners engineered a series of deals that hurt the company’s now-bankrupt operating unit and its creditors, resulting in potential damages of $3.6 billion to $5.1 billion.

A U.S. appeals court dismissed a closely watched creditor lawsuit yesterday that stemmed from the 2008 bankruptcy of Tribune Co., a day after it took the unusual step of withdrawing a nearly identical opinion because it had been published in error, Reuters reported yesterday. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit had ruled on Thursday that Tribune creditors could not claw back $8 billion paid to public shareholders nearly a decade ago in a buyout that was blamed for its bankruptcy. On Monday, the court issued a two-sentence order saying the opinion was published by mistake, and took the rare step of clawing back its clawback ruling. Yesterday’s opinion came to the same conclusion as the withdrawn ruling, and ran the same 53 pages. A side-by-side comparison revealed about five tweaks, such as replacing "transferred to" with "assumed by" in describing the arcane procedures for determining ownership of certain legal claims. The opinion also changed a "with" to a "without" in a comment attributed to a former securities regulator.