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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.

Credit Suisse has lodged a $440 million claim against Japan's SoftBank Group Corp in London as it presses ahead with formal proceedings in a dispute borne from the failure of Greensill Capital, a finance firm, Reuters reported. The Swiss lender is trying to recover client funds that Greensill had lent to Katerra, a SoftBank-backed U.S. construction group that filed for bankruptcy in 2021. SoftBank has vowed to vigorously fight the claim. The collapse of Greensill, along with a string of scandals, helped dent confidence in the 167-year-old Swiss bank. When turmoil hit the global banking industry in March, the Swiss government engineered a takeover by its rival UBS to "secure financial stability and protect the Swiss economy." But Credit Suisse remains determined to salvage outstanding money from the collapse of about $10 billion in client funds linked to financier Lex Greensill's supply chain finance firm, which imploded two years ago. It has alleged that SoftBank was aware of a Katerra restructuring in 2020 that effectively placed Credit Suisse's investor assets out of reach, according to court documents filed in the United States in 2021.

Cineworld Group Plc is set to submit its bankruptcy-exit plan on Wednesday after reaching a deal with creditors to trim billions of dollars of debt from its balance sheet, according to a lawyer for the company, Bloomberg News reported. Cineworld expects to file the plan alongside a restructuring support agreement — a deal in which a troubled company’s key creditors agree to back a debt-cutting proposal. Both agreements should be filed publicly on Wednesday, Josh Sussberg, a bankruptcy lawyer for Cineworld, said in a court hearing Tuesday. “We are down to literally dotting ‘i’s and crossing ‘t’s,” Sussberg said. He didn’t provide further details on the plan. The world’s second-largest theater chain, which owns Regal Cinemas in the US, has struggled to find buyers for the whole company in recent months. It has received no bids that come close to covering Cineworld’s $6 billion in outstanding secured debt, Sussberg said. A sale process for the holding company has effectively “been terminated,” he added. However, there are several potential buyers interested in the company’s operations in eastern Europe and Israel, he said. Binding bids for that portion of the firm are due on April 10.

A cohort of TV Azteca SAB’s creditors filed a petition to force the Mexican broadcaster into involuntary bankruptcy in the U.S., the latest twist in drawn-out debt talks, Bloomberg News reported. Holders of about $63 million of unsecured Azteca bonds filed an involuntary chapter 11 petition against the company in New York, according to court papers on Monday. The move marks the second attempt by bondholders to get traction for their claims against Azteca after it defaulted on the $400 million of notes in 2021. Negotiations have been thorny between creditors and the media company, which is controlled by Mexico’s third-richest man, Ricardo Salinas Pliego. The defaulted dollar notes, which were set to mature in 2024, were trading at 42.25 cents as of March 14, according to Trace data. Shares of the company have fallen more than 11% so far this year, even as an MSCI Inc. gauge of Mexican stocks climbs about 14%. In a Tuesday statement, Azteca reiterated its commitment to negotiations with creditors and financial discipline. The company said it would respond “responsibly” to the legal proceedings and expected the authorities to side with Azteca. Involuntary bankruptcy cases require a company to either agree to put itself under court protection or fight creditors in court. Now that a petition has been filed, a judge will be asked to decide whether Azteca stays in bankruptcy, or if the case is dismissed. The creditors are identified as Plenisfer Investments SGR SpA, Cyrus Capital Partners LP and Sandpiper Ltd. in the petition.