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Families of nine victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting are challenging weapons maker Remington Outdoor Co.’s proposal to quickly sell its assets in bankruptcy, asking how the company landed back in chapter 11 at a time when Americans are buying guns at record levels, the Wall Street Journal reported. In a court filing Friday, lawyers suing Remington over the 2012 mass killing of 20 children and six school staff members in Newtown, Conn., questioned how the company found itself in such desperate financial shape after wiping away hundreds of millions of dollars in debt in a previous bankruptcy in 2018. Remington filed for chapter 11 protection again last month, saying that even with Americans stocking up on guns and ammunition, it couldn’t profit because its cash is tied up by lenders. Gun sales have been driven by civil unrest sparked by the COVID-19 pandemic and the killing of George Floyd by police. The company said it wouldn’t last long without finding a buyer. The Sandy Hook families said on Friday that they aren’t convinced and questioned the company’s motivations for seeking bankruptcy protection, asking for a delay in the bankruptcy sale process. Remington has agreed to delay hearings on its sale process by a week, to give a newly appointed creditors committee time to weigh in.

The NAACP on Friday moved to intervene in Purdue Pharma's chapter 11 case, arguing that communities of color should receive settlement proceeds stemming from the national opioid crisis, Reuters reported. The group's motion to intervene comes amid the OxyContin-maker's efforts in bankruptcy to bring in more support for a settlement of opioid litigation that it says is worth more than $10 billion. The company filed for chapter 11 in September 2019 aiming to resolve the litigation. In its filing, the NAACP argues that attention has been disproportionately paid to white suburban and rural areas affected by the epidemic, rather than communities of color that have endured similar harm. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Robert Drain in New York will consider the group's request at a court hearing on Aug. 26.

Families of victims of the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School rebuked Remington on Wednesday for leaving them off of its chapter 11 bankruptcy creditors list, saying that damages they are seeking in litigation should be included, Law360 reported. The families told an Alabama federal bankruptcy court that the potential damages from their wrongful death suit against Remington Arms Co. LLC would "dwarf" the other claims of the company's top 40 creditors and that there is "no justification" for them not to be included on the list. "After six years of nationally significant litigation, it is simply not plausible that the debtors did not realize that the Sandy Hook families should have been included as top 40 unsecured creditors," the families said, adding that the omission is "glaring" considering the fact the families were included on the list when the company filed for bankruptcy in 2018. In light of the omission, the families urged the bankruptcy court to hold an emergency status conference, arguing that they would be irreparably harmed if they are not included on the list because they would be unable to participate in hearings and would not be considered for the unsecured creditors' committee.

A New Jersey appeals court’s decision to revive two lawsuits accusing Johnson & Johnson’s iconic Baby Powder of causing cancer may lead to the reinstatement of about 1,000 suits targeting the talc-based product, Bloomberg News reported. A three-judge panel of the New Jersey Superior Court said on Wednesday that a trial judge erroneously threw out expert testimony backing up claims by two women that talc caused their ovarian cancers, clearing the cases for trial. The ruling could also affect other talc cases on hold before the same judge. “There are approximately 1,000 ovarian cancer cases currently filed in New Jersey state court, with more to come,” Ted Meadows, one of the lawyers representing women bringing the baby powder cases, said in a statement. “This ruling paves the way for those cases to proceed to trial.” That’s unwelcome news to J&J, which is headquartered in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and previously tried to transfer most talc litigation to the state in the belief that it might have a home-court advantage. Wednesday’s ruling and a New Jersey jury’s February award of $750 million in a talc case may help dispel that notion. J&J pulled Baby Powder off the market in the U.S. and Canada in May. The number of cases alleging it causes cancer continues to mount, though, increasing 15 percent over the last eight months, according to J&J securities filings. The company now faces more than 20,000 talc lawsuits, some claiming talc itself causes cancer and others pointing to alleged asbestos contamination in talc. Imerys Talc America, a unit of Paris-based Imerys SA that mined talc used in J&J’s baby powder, also was named as a defendant in the cases. But it sought bankruptcy protection from creditors last year. The company is offering to settle more than 14,000 talc lawsuits by selling itself and other Imerys units as part of the bankruptcy and putting the proceeds into a trust for claimants.

A group of hedge funds and debt investors that once dreamed of taking over PG&E Corp. are demanding hundreds of millions of dollars from the troubled utility, complaining they were unfairly shut out of a lucrative deal with big shareholders, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Led by New York hedge fund Elliott Management Corp., the group of bondholders say that PG&E failed to do what it could to ensure they received a slice of equity-raising action, which carried rewards for investors willing to take a chance and aid the California utility’s exit from bankruptcy. A PG&E spokesperson said Wednesday the utility strongly disagrees with the bondholder argument and will respond in due course to motions which were recently filed in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in San Francisco. PG&E was driven into bankruptcy in 2019 by an estimated $30 billion in claims over property damage, injuries and deaths from years of wildfires linked to its equipment. The San Francisco-based utility was determined to exit bankruptcy this summer, which experts project will be the start of another bad fire season. To do that, it needed to raise $20 billion in debt and equity. Fire risks, political complications and tumult in the capital markets linked to the COVID-19 pandemic made PG&E’s shares a risky bet. Stock that sold for nearly $18 a share in the pre-pandemic market was selling for less than $10 a share when PG&E left bankruptcy protection at the end of June. PG&E needed to issue new debt and equity to cover the $25.5 billion it pledged to pay to compensate fire victims and insurance companies for their losses. Bondholders say they agreed to support PG&E’s chapter 11 exit in a pact that included a pledge by the company to see they got a slice of the equity. That didn’t happen, the bondholders say, as PG&E dashed into the open market and raised cash by way of an underwritten offering and a private sale of equity, on terms that conferred benefits on big investors able to participate.

Less than a month after emerging from bankruptcy triggered by a string of devastating wildfires in 2017 and 2018, PG&E Corp. has now been found responsible for California’s biggest blaze of 2019, Bloomberg News reported. The California energy giant’s power lines sparked the Kincade fire which burned 77,758 acres and destroyed 374 structures in Sonoma County wine country, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, said yesterday. Investigators have sent a report on the incident to the Sonoma County District Attorney’s Office, only a month after PG&E pleaded guilty to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter for a 2018 conflagration that was the most deadly in state history. Brandon Gilbert, an assistant to Sonoma County District Attorney Jill Ravitch, said his office recently received the reports and will start reviewing them. PG&E said that it doesn’t have access to Cal Fire’s report or the evidence it collected. PG&E’s equipment was long suspected of causing the Kincade fire that started on Oct. 23, as the utility had reported that one of its transmission lines malfunctioned near the location and time of the start of the blaze. The company said in May that it could book a loss of at least $600 million stemming from damages tied to the wildfire. The Kincade fire likely won’t cause the same kind of financial trouble for PG&E as the string of catastrophic blazes in 2017 and 2018 that were blamed on its equipment and pushed it into bankruptcy more than a year ago. PG&E estimated liabilities from those fires at $30 billion. The company emerged from chapter 11 at the start of this month after having settled claims from the earlier fires for $25.5 billion. The Kincade blaze wasn’t included in the bankruptcy settlement with victims.

A $19 million settlement between Harvey Weinstein and some of his accusers was rejected yesterday by a judge, the Associated Press reported. U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Heellerstein in Manhattan said Weinstein’s accusers in the proposed class-action settlement were too varied to be grouped together. Lawyers for several women who had opposed the deal praised what they described as Hellerstein’s swift rejection of a one-sided proposal. A spokesperson for New York Attorney General Letitia James, who announced the tentative agreement on June 30, said her office is reviewing the decision and determining its next steps. “Our office has been fighting tirelessly to provide these brave women with the justice they are owed and will continue to do so,” Morgan Rubin said in a written statement. The deal to settle lawsuits brought by James and a Chicago lawyer on behalf of multiple women would have provided between $7,500 and $750,000 to some women who accused Weinstein of sexually abusing them. The 68-year-old former Hollywood producer was convicted earlier this year of rape and sexual assault against two women. Accusations by dozens of women in 2017 led to the downfall of his career and gave rise to #MeToo, the global movement to hold powerful men accountable for their sexual misconduct.

People claiming they were sexually abused as children involved in Boy Scouts activities say they have turned up evidence that assets have been deliberately moved out of their reach as the youth organization tries to deal with its legal problems in bankruptcy, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Suspicions about potentially improper activity are feeding a growing mistrust in the chapter 11 proceeding of the Boy Scouts of America, which filed for bankruptcy protection to deal with litigation accusing it of failing to safeguard boys from predators in its ranks. Facing more than 10,000 claims of sexual abuse, the Boy Scouts say they want to negotiate rather than litigate and are seeking to set up a fund to pay victims. But with talks just getting started, victims say that the Boy Scouts aren’t watching over the assets needed to pay their claims. Days ago, the Middle Tennessee Council of the Boy Scouts transferred a property to an asset protection trust, a legal entity that shields the property from the claims of sexual-abuse victims, said James Stang, a lawyer for the official committee representing sexual-abuse victims, at a hearing yesterday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Del. Jessica Boelter, a lawyer for the Boy Scouts, said progress is being made in the bankruptcy proceeding, which has as its goal an agreed resolution of the child sexual-abuse claims that have shadowed the historic brand. Boy Scout local councils own most of the youth organization’s wealth, with more than $3 billion in land, facilities, artwork, investments and other assets, compared with the $1.4 billion that is on the books of the national group.

Two days after a federal judge said he was likely to deny approval of Bayer’s $1.1 billion class action settlement over Roundup, the lead plaintiffs attorneys withdrew their court documents in order to revise the agreement, Law.com reported. Plaintiffs attorney Elizabeth Cabraser filed the notice of withdrawal yesterday. The filing comes after U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria of the Northern District of California raised several concerns about the settlement, reached last month alongside a raft of other agreements, valued at up to $10.9 billion, which resolved 75 percent of the 125,000 claims alleging Roundup caused non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The class settlement, which is the only one to face scrutiny by a judge, is part of Bayer’s strategy to cap subsidiary Monsanto’s liability for future claims over Roundup, which remains on store shelves.