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Russian billionaire Vladislav Doronin has scored victories in London and New York in a long-running dispute over a former business partner in his Aman Resorts luxury hotel chain, the Wall Street Journal reported today. Doronin’s first victory occurred earlier last week, when the High Court in London issued an order confirming the settlement between the Russian hotel operator and the U.K. liquidators of a company founded by U.S. venture capitalist Omar Amanat, Doronin’s ex-partner. The settlement order came just days after creditors tried to push the defunct shell company and former owner of the resort chain, Aman Resorts Group Ltd., into bankruptcy in New York. An involuntary bankruptcy petition had been filed listing creditors, including Amanat and other former directors, claiming that they were owed about $70 million. However, just days after the involuntary petition was filed in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York, the involuntary case took a sudden turn when a new legal team moved in to dismiss the case and the company’s bankruptcy lawyer withdrew from the proceedings.

Creditors of Russian billionaire Vladislav Doronin's Aman Resorts Group Ltd., are trying to push the ultra luxurious resort operator favored by rock royalty, Hollywood stars and business tycoons into bankruptcy, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported today. The backers, namely American venture capitalist Omar Amanat, British hedge fund manager George Robinson and resort founder Adrian Zecha, said in court papers filed yesterday that the hotel chain owes them about $70.9 million in unpaid fees.

A former Watergate prosecutor is due to release a report on a court-ordered fraud investigation into a series of corporate deals involving Caesars Entertainment Corp. that could break a deadlock in one of the biggest fights on Wall Street over the bankruptcy of Caesars’ casino operating unit, Caesars Entertainment Operating Co. Inc. (CEOC), Reuters reported on Friday. Richard Davis and a team of lawyers and advisers have spent a year trying to determine if Caesars fairly tried to rescue CEOC, or stripped away the best properties and left it with faded regional casinos and a crushing $18 billion of debt. The examiner said in a court filing that the report would be filed under seal the week of March 7 with an outside date of March 14, along with a public summary of Davis' findings. The full report will be made public in the weeks following the initial, redacted release. Caesars has proposed injecting $1.5 billion into its operating unit to settle allegations of asset-stripping, and the examiner's report could show whether or not that amount is fair.

The administrators of a top luxury hotel in Puerto Rico have been arrested and charged in a tax evasion case as the U.S. territory cracks down on corruption amid a worsening economic crisis, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported today. The island's Justice Department said that Wilhelm Sack and Harold Davies Mayne of the Horned Dorset Primavera are accused of withholding more than $600,000 in room occupancy tax over the past six years. The announcement comes nearly a year after the hotel filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy as it struggled with nearly $1.7 million in debts, including more than $800,000 owed to Puerto Rico's Treasury Department and more than $320,000 owed to the island's struggling power company.

Retired U.S. Judge Joseph Farnan has agreed to serve as the mediator in the chapter 11 bankruptcy of the operating unit of Caesars Entertainment Corp., Reuters reported yesterday. Farnan's agreement to mediate the drawn-out case came as the company and creditors wait for the independent examiner's report, due mid-March. Creditors have accused Caesars of looting the operating unit before the bankruptcy for the benefit of private equity owners Apollo Global Management and TPG Capital Management . The examiner's report will look into the accusations. The operating unit proposed a mediator last month as a way to help creditors reach a compromise and guide the case to resolution.

Trump Entertainment Resorts Inc., the casino operator founded by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, emerged from bankruptcy court protection on Friday and is now a subsidiary of billionaire Carl Icahn’s Icahn Enterprises LP, Bloomberg News reported. While Trump hasn’t owned the parent of the Taj Mahal casino for years, his record in Atlantic City, N.J., has become a topic on the campaign trail. Trump opened the Taj Mahal in 1990. The parent company continually struggled with debt, and Trump Entertainment filed for bankruptcy court protection in September 2014. The filing coincided with a protracted downturn in betting in Atlantic City that led four of the city’s 12 casinos to close. It was the Trump casino businesses’ fourth time in bankruptcy.

A bondholder lawsuit against Caesars Entertainment Corp., which the casino company has warned could plunge it into bankruptcy alongside its operating unit, was stayed by Bankruptcy Judge Benjamin Goldgar on Friday, Reuters reported. Judge Goldgar said that the stay on the litigation would be lifted either on May 9 or 60 days after an examiner publishes his report into corporate deals that the bondholders allege stripped the operating unit of its best assets. The operating unit filed for bankruptcy in Goldgar's court last year. The judge ordered an examiner, Richard Davis, to investigate those allegations and Davis has said that his report will be released by the middle of March. Caesars has said that it expects to prevail in the lawsuit in federal court in Manhattan, but it wanted to remove the threat it could be found to be liable for billions of dollars to holders of bonds issued by its operating unit. The bondholders sued in New York because they believe the parent company guaranteed the bonds, which were issued by the now-bankrupt Caesars Entertainment Operating Co Inc.

Creditors squabbling over Caesars Entertainment Operating Co.’s $20 billion reorganization asked Bankruptcy Judge Benjamin Goldgar to order them into mediation and to appoint either an active or retired bankruptcy jurist to supervise, but were refused, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. “You don’t need my permission,” Goldgar said yesterday. “Just click your heels together three times and say, ‘There is no place like mediation.’” Mediation is a great idea that is months overdue, Goldgar said. But last month, the local rules that gave federal judges power to order mediation in Northern Illinois were revoked. And there is no other legal authority to justify ordering everybody to sit down and negotiate, Goldgar said. The decision appeared to surprise the dozens of lawyers and other professionals who gathered in Chicago for the hearing. All the major bondholder groups and other lenders, who have been warring since the case was filed more than a year ago, had asked Goldgar for the mediation order. Without court-ordered mediation, creditors who feel left out of the company’s current reorganization proposal will be free to refuse to negotiate.

Glenn Straub is “at it again,” according to lawyers for a handful of deserted restaurants trapped inside the shuttered Revel Casino Hotel in Atlantic City, N.J., the Wall Street Journal Bankruptcy Beat Blog reported yesterday. Bankruptcy court papers filed earlier this month show yet another dispute between the restaurants and the Florida-based developer has flared up, this time fueled by nearly a quarter million dollars of alcohol — beer, wine and liquor left behind in the darkened resort. Last spring, a bankruptcy judge approved an $82 million sale of Revel to Straub, ending nearly 10 months of courtroom struggles for control of the property. The purchase price amounted to more than a 96 percent discount from the $2.4 billion it cost to build Revel. Revel never turned a profit after opening its doors in 2012 and landed in chapter 11 twice in just two years. But the judge’s order left unresolved one of the stickiest aspects of the sale: whether former business tenants, including the restaurants, can remain at Revel when — and if — the property reopens. The issue remains tied up in litigation.

Senior creditors of Caesars Entertainment Corp.’s bankrupt operating unit are threatening to abandon a framework agreement and propose their own formal restructuring plan as soon as Monday, Reuters reported yesterday. Until now, senior lenders and bondholders have been the only creditors to back a framework agreement to slash some $10 billion of debt from Caesars' operating unit, which filed for bankruptcy with $18 billion of debt in January 2015. But since that deal was revised in October, they say that there has been "a very substantial decline in the value of the debt and equity securities proposed to be provided" to them, according to a bankruptcy court filing yesterday.