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Harland and Wolff, the Belfast shipyard that built the Titanic, was put into administration on Monday after its bankrupt Norwegian owner failed to find a buyer and calls for its nationalization were rebuffed, Reuters reported. The shipyard, whose towering yellow cranes dominate the Northern Irish city’s skyline, has been occupied by workers fearful for their jobs since last week. They said yesterday that they would block administrators from entering the site. The business was put up for sale last year by Norwegian parent Dolphin Drilling, which filed for bankruptcy in June. Opened in 1861, Harland and Wolff employed more than 30,000 people in its World War Two heyday. It has been in decline for over half a century, however, and now employs just 130 full-time workers, specializing in energy and marine engineering projects — though it hires in large numbers of contractors when it secures work.

Chief Bankruptcy Judge Laurel M. Isicoff in the Southern District of Florida has settled a long-running dispute over who really owned a string of defendant companies, siding with the trustee, who can now recover more than $600 million in assets and interest in a bankruptcy case, Law.com reported. The debtor, Leonidas Ortega Trujillo, a Miami businessman from a wealthy Ecuadorian family, filed for chapter 7 bankruptcy in June 2015. But since 1996, he had been in litigation with the Ecuadorian government, represented by K&L Gates, over the failure of what once was the country’s fourth-largest bank, run by the family. After a 10-week trial, Judge Isicoff found that although Trujillo wasn’t the named owner of the corporate defendants, he was the one who controlled and benefited from them. That means the debtor will no longer get the bankruptcy discharge he had been granted in 2017. Kozyak, Tropin & Throckmorton partner Corali Lopez-Castro, attorney for the trustee, alleged that Trujillo had only filed for chapter 7 bankruptcy protection to shake off a judgment against him in the government’s lawsuit, which was litigated in the Bahamas.

A U.S. appeals court said Venezuela’s stake in U.S.-based oil refiner Citgo Petroleum Corp. could be seized to satisfy a judgment against the country, dealing a blow to its U.S.-backed opposition government, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit yesterday sided with Crystallex International Corp., a defunct Canadian gold miner that has laid claim to Citgo’s valuable Gulf Coast crude refineries to collect on a $1.4 billion debt. The ruling further clouds the future of Citgo, which has considered filing for bankruptcy to sort out competing claims from creditors. As Venezuela’s largest seizable asset in the U.S., Citgo is an obvious source of compensation for bondholders and multinational companies that are owed billions of dollars and haven’t been paid during the country’s lengthy economic meltdown. Of all the claimants circling Citgo, Crystallex was the first to fight its way to the company’s front door, winning permission from a Delaware federal judge last year to seize shares in Citgo’s U.S. parent company.

The number of insolvent companies in England and Wales hit its highest in more than five years in the second quarter of 2019, according to data today that showed businesses under rising financial pressure as Brexit nears, Reuters reported. The Insolvency Service, a government agency, said 4,321 companies entered insolvency in the April-June period on an underlying basis, excluding bulk closures of personal service companies. This was up from 4,213 in the first quarter and marked the largest total since early 2014. The figures showed fewer personal insolvencies, chiming with other data that show resilience among consumers but a muted picture of the business economy. The number of personal insolvencies continued to decline after striking an eight-year high at the end of 2018, dropping to 30,937 in England and Wales in the second quarter from 31,346 in the first three months of 2019, the Insolvency Service said.

The Ontario government has written off a $445-million loan to automotive manufacturer Chrysler, saying it has "no legal recourse" to collect it, CBC.ca reported. The $445-million figure was part of a loan issued by the governments of Canada and Ontario in 2009 to bail out the then-struggling corporation, which had filed for chapter 11 protection in the U.S. in the wake of the world economic crisis. The company was eventually bought out by Italian automotive manufacturer Fiat, leading to the creation of the Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (FCA) holding company in 2014. FCA says it has repaid all its original loans. Emily Hogeveen, a spokesperson for Ontario Finance Minister Rod Phillips, explained the federal government wrote off their portion of the loan in March 2018. "Given the structure of the loan, once the federal government made the decision to write off their portion, there was no legal recourse for Ontario to further recover funds," she said. "This decision has no impact on our fiscal plan, as this debt was accounted for in the years following non-payment," said Hogeveen.