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Trucking company failures are rising as faltering freight demand exposes operators unprepared for a downturn after last year’s red-hot shipping market, the Wall Street Journal reported. Approximately 640 carriers went out of business in the first half of 2019, up from 175 for the same period last year and more than double the total number of trucker failures in 2018, according to transportation industry data firm Broughton Capital LLC. This week, Denver-based HVH Transportation Inc. abruptly shut down, stranding about 150 drivers and loads out on the road. The closure adds to a 2019 tally that includes Ohio truckload company Falcon Transport Co. and regional less-than-truckload carriers New England Motor Freight Inc. and LME Inc. Former HVH Chief Executive John Kenneally said he is negotiating with the carrier’s bank on steps to help get the drivers’ fuel cards reactivated so that they can deliver their loads and get home. The company has about 380 trucks, including those tied to a related Canadian company, FTI Transportation, which also shut this week, Kenneally said. That company also belonged to HVH’s owner, private-equity firm HCI Equity Partners.

Illinois bonds rallied yesterday after a judge denied a petition by the head of a conservative think tank that sought to invalidate more than $14 billion of debt issued by the state, Bloomberg News reported. Sangamon County Associate Judge Jack Davis yesterday rejected the petition filed by John Tillman, head of the Illinois Policy Institute, and backed by Warlander Asset Management, a New York-based hedge fund, that sought to “restrain and enjoin the disbursement of public funds,” according to court documents. Tillman had claimed that Illinois’s record pension bond sale in 2003 and debt issued in 2017 were deficit financing that violated the state constitution, which says bonds must be issued for “specific purposes.” “The court finds that to allow the filing of the Complaint would result in an unjustified interference with the application of public funds,” Davis wrote in an order yesterday. “The court finds reasonable grounds do not exist for filing the proposed Complaint.” Tillman said that he plans to appeal and “strongly” disagrees with the court’s decision, adding that it was “premature for the Court to decide the case on the merits at the petition stage.”

A bankruptcy judge held off on ruling on a dispute between Blackjewel LLC and the U.S. Labor Department over whether the West Virginia company can sell its coal before paying laid-off miners for their work, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Judge Frank Volk told lawyers for the company and the government at a hearing on Friday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Charleston, W.Va., that he will hold an evidentiary hearing in the next two weeks before ruling on the dispute. A group of laid-off coal miners has been protesting for the past month on train tracks near Cumberland, Ky., blocking a shipment of coal from going out until they receive their back wages. Lawyers for the Labor Department argued in court Friday that since the miners haven’t yet been paid the approximately $4 million of wages they are owed, the coal is considered “hot goods,” and it would be a violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act for it to be transported or transferred to a buyer. Blackjewel’s lawyers told the court that the company entered into an agreement before the bankruptcy filing to sell the coal. The buyer already paid 75 percent of the payment, and wants to pay the remaining 25 percent, amounting to $1.4 million, to take delivery of the goods. The Blackjewel lawyers argued that the remaining $1.4 million could be placed into an escrow account until the matter is adjudicated.

Refiner Philadelphia Energy Solutions is laying off the majority of its unionized workforce yesterday and today, the union’s president said, ahead of an initial layoff deadline, Reuters reported. PES began dismissing a small number of union workers last Thursday, before an earlier-stated Aug. 25 termination date, as the company idles its fire-damaged refinery after filing for bankruptcy. Union employees are expected to be paid through Aug. 25, but the company has so far not offered severance pay or continued health benefits, sources have said. Roughly 280 of the facility’s 640 steelworkers were dismissed yesterday, said Ryan O’Callaghan, head of the refinery union, who works as an operator at the plant. O’Callaghan and a team of negotiators are currently bargaining with PES to retain a crew of union workers trained to run the plant’s wastewater system and conduct other work to safeguard the site while it is closed.

Bankrupt coal producer Blackjewel LLC, an affiliated marketing company and the U.S. Department of Labor have agreed to a number of stipulations that will halt the transport of coal at three sites in Virginia until the issue of idled employees receiving overdue pay is resolved, according to a filing in a federal bankruptcy court, the Bristol (Va.) Herald Courier reported. The federal government argues that the coal at three Blackjewel facilities in Raven, Honaker and Appalachia are “hot goods” produced in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which prohibits the transportation of goods made in violation of minimum wage and overtime requirements. Blackjewel and the marketing company, Blackjewel Marketing and Sales Holdings LP, “agree that they shall not transport, offer for transportation, ship, deliver, sell, or otherwise place into commerce any coal mined, processed, or stored in Virginia, including but not limited to the Virginia Coal” at the three locations “until the issue of the uncompensated work performed on the Virginia Coal by Debtors’ employees is resolved,” states the Friday filing. Blackjewel filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on July 1 in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of West Virginia. As the company started bankruptcy proceedings, it halted operations at its facilities in Virginia, Kentucky, West Virginia and Wyoming.

Several senior White House officials have begun discussing whether to push for a temporary payroll tax cut as a way to arrest an economic slowdown, the Washington Post reported. Even though deliberations about the payroll tax cut were held Monday, the White House released a statement disputing that the idea was actively under “consideration.” “As [National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow] said yesterday, more tax cuts for the American people are certainly on the table, but cutting payroll taxes is not something under consideration at this time,” the statement said. The statement and the internal discussions over the payroll tax cut are part of a rapidly evolving effort by the White House to exude confidence about the economy’s strength while simultaneously hunting for ways to bolster business and consumer confidence. Business spending already has pulled back, in part because of fears about the trade war, but consumer spending has remained robust.

Blackjewel LLC took more than $52.8 million in loans from its former chairman and chief executive, most of which the business repaid, in the six months before the coal-mining company’s sudden bankruptcy, which has left workers unpaid and the future of some of its mines uncertain, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Loans from Blackjewel’s former chief executive officer and president, Jeff Hoops Sr., were the source of a dispute between the coal business and senior lender Riverstone Credit Partners that the company has said was the cause of its chapter 11 filing. The amount of the loans was disclosed in filings by Blackjewel in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Charleston, W.Va. Hoops provided the loans to Blackjewel between Jan. 10 and June 27 and during the same six months the company repaid him more than $41.8 million, court papers say. Blackjewel still owes Hoops approximately $10.6 million, according to the company’s filings. The company filed for bankruptcy on July 1.

A protest that began with five men blocking a train full of coal has grown into a small 24-hour tent city along some railroad tracks next to the highway. The railroad blockade began in late July, about a month after Blackjewel, the two-year-old company where the miners worked, suddenly declared bankruptcy. Blackjewel owned mines in four states, and employed over a thousand miners in central Appalachia, the New York Times reported. Miners learned in the middle of an afternoon shift that Blackjewel was shutting down immediately and putting everyone out of work. It did so without filing a mandatory 60-day advance warning and without posting a bond, required by Kentucky law, to cover payroll. Workers received no pay for their last week on the job. Then they learned that their paychecks for the previous two weeks had bounced. In Harlan County, hundreds of miners found themselves with negative bank balances, staring down mortgages, car payments and medication costs. Some were alerted to the news by ex-spouses who had not gotten automatic child-support payments. Lawyers representing the miners in the bankruptcy proceeding estimated that Blackjewel’s employees in central Appalachia were each owed $4,202.91 on average, for wages and benefits earned.

Pension plans claiming they were owed about $40 million from the bankruptcy of the Boston Herald have reached a settlement with the remnants of the newspaper company and with its former publisher, the Wall Street Journal reported. Terms of the agreement include allowing the New England Teamsters & Trucking Industry Pension Fund to have a $13 million claim, less than half of the $29 million claim originally sought, according to papers filed Thursday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Del. In bankruptcy, a claim is a right to payment, whether it is eventually reduced or disputed. William Baldiga, a Brown Rudnick LLP lawyer representing the paper’s former owner HMH Media Inc. and related affiliates, said the pension plans’ claims, which are mostly unsecured in the settlement, will likely receive about 6 cents to 10 cents on the dollar of the allowed claims. That means the Teamsters’ claims are likely to receive about $1.3 million at most under the agreement. Two other pension plans are also part of the settlement. The proposed debt-repayment plan also calls for former Boston Herald publisher Patrick Purcell to waive various claims, including severance, in exchange for a release, or a grant of legal immunity. An independent director for HMH Media has reviewed the Purcell claims “and assessed whether Mr. Purcell might be liable” to the reorganized businesses, Thursday’s court filing said. That director recommended that the agreement resolving the claims of Purcell and the pension plans be approved.

Refiner Philadelphia Energy Solutions will begin dismissing some of its 640 union workers today, more than a week before its stated Aug. 25 termination date, Reuters reported. It was not clear how many of the workers would be dismissed early from the East Coast’s largest and oldest oil refinery, but a source said that it would be “a significant number.” Union employees are expected to be paid through Aug. 25, the sources said, as the fire-damaged plant continues to wind down operations after the company filed for bankruptcy protection last month. PES has said it hopes to sell the plant to a buyer that would restart it. The company has declined to offer workers severance pay and has said it would halt health insurance coverage at month’s end. PES entered chapter 11 bankruptcy on July 21, a month after a fire at the 335,000-barrel-per-day plant destroyed an alkylation unit used in the production of gasoline. The company had emerged from a previous bankruptcy last year. PES initially said it would dismiss union and non-union employees by mid-July following the fire, but it later extended the employment of the plant’s union workers.