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Eight men were sexually abused when they were Boy Scouts in Hawaii in the 1960s and 1970s, they alleged in a lawsuit filed Friday as the state's window closed on allowing child sex abuse claims that would have been barred under a statute of limitations, the Associated Press reported. Various states and Washington, D.C., extended or suspended statute of limitations to allow child sex abuse claims stretching back decades. In Hawaii, a window for filing old claims was first opened in 2012. It was reopened in 2018 and closed Friday. The lawsuit by the eight men now living in Hawaii, California, Oregon and Washington state also comes while attorneys urge potential victims to come forward as Boy Scouts of America works on its bankruptcy plan. The Boy Scouts filed for bankruptcy protection in February in an effort to halt hundreds of individual lawsuits and create a huge compensation fund for men who were molested as youngsters decades ago by scoutmasters or other leaders.

Bayer AG raised the specter of “considerable liquidity challenges” as it engages in high-stakes negotiations over Roundup litigation in the U.S. and grapples with the pandemic, Bloomberg News reported. The number of plaintiffs claiming that the weedkiller caused their cancers rose to 52,500 from 48,600 in February, Bayer said in its first-quarter earnings statement. It’s still too early to know how COVID-19 will impact this year’s results, but the outbreak has already slowed talks with plaintiff attorneys. Bayer said that it’s pushing for a “financially reasonable” settlement that also resolves the potential for future claims. “Against the background of a looming recession and looking at, in part, considerable liquidity challenges, this applies now more than ever,” the company said.

General Motors Co. yesterday won preliminary U.S. court approval of a $120 million settlement with owners who said defective ignition switches caused their vehicles to lose value, Reuters reported. U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman in Manhattan granted approval at a hearing conducted by phone. The accord would resolve the last major piece of litigation over GM ignition switches linked to vehicle stalls and air bags that failed to deploy, as well as 124 deaths. Final approval is still required, after owners are notified of their rights. Since 2014, the defect has led GM to recall more than 2.6 million Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, GMC, Oldsmobile, Pontiac and Saturn vehicles, dating back more than a decade. The Detroit-based automaker has also paid more than $2.6 billion in penalties and settlements. GM would fund $70 million of the settlement, while a trust set up in connection with its 2009 bankruptcy would contribute $50 million. The automaker would pay the plaintiffs’ lawyers separately.

Bankrupt power producer PG&E Corp. said yesterday that Chief Executive Officer William Johnson would retire after more than a year with the company and be replaced by William Smith on an interim basis, Reuters reported. Smith, current PG&E board member and former president of AT&T Technology Services, will take over after Johnson’s departure on June 30. California-based PG&E and its utility unit filed for bankruptcy in January 2019, citing more than $30 billion in potential liabilities from major wildfires in 2017 and 2018 that were linked to its equipment. The company appointed William Johnson to the top job on April 3, 2019, to steer it through its Chapter 11 proceedings and stabilize its operations. “By the end of June, I expect that both of these goals will have been met,” Johnson said.

New York state brought civil charges yesterday accusing Mallinckrodt Plc of insurance fraud for misrepresenting the safety and efficacy of its opioid drugs, leading to medically unnecessary prescriptions, Reuters reported. Governor Andrew Cuomo said the charges brought by New York’s Department of Financial Services are the first against a major opioid manufacturer in the regulator’s probe into entities that contributed to the nationwide opioid crisis. New York accused Mallinckrodt of overstating the benefits of long-term opioid treatment, downplaying the risks of addiction and abuse, and knowing its conduct would result in the payment of fraudulent insurance claims on unnecessary prescriptions. Mallinckrodt is the largest maker of generic opioids in the U.S. According to New York, it supplied more than 1 billion pills to about 5 million policyholders in the state from 2009 to 2019. The company was charged with violating two New York insurance laws, with civil penalties of up to $5,000 per violation.

Major U.S. business lobbying groups are asking Congress to pass measures that would protect companies large and small from coronavirus-related lawsuits when states start to lift pandemic restrictions and businesses begin to reopen, Reuters reported. Their concerns have the ears of congressional Republicans, though it is far from clear if the idea has the Democratic support it would need to pass in the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) are seeking temporary, legal and regulatory safe harbor legislation to curb liabilities for employers who follow official health and safety guidelines. Businesses want to make sure that they are not held liable for policy decisions by government officials, should employees or customers contract COVID-19 once operations resume. They also want protection from litigation that could result from coronavirus-related disruptions to issues like wages and hours, leave and travel. The debate over when to ease restrictions intended to slow the spread of the COVID-19 disease, which has killed more than 40,000 Americans, has recently entered a more politically charged phase with President Donald Trump voicing support for scattered street protests aimed at ending the restrictions. Public health officials warn that doing so prematurely risks sending infection rates soaring and further taxing an overwhelmed healthcare system.

A California regulator has asked PG&E Corp. for governance and oversight changes in its reorganization plan, while also proposing penalties of about $2 billion on the San-Francisco based utility for its role in causing the devastating 2017 and 2018 wildfires in California, Reuters reported. The proposal from the regulator “will require PG&E to modify its governance structure, submit to an enhanced oversight and enforcement process if it fails to improve safety, and create local operating regions”, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) said yesterday. Separately, CPUC Commissioner Clifford Rechtschaffen proposed imposing $1.94 billion in penalties on PG&E for the utility’s role in the 2017 and 2018 wildfires. In the proposal, an earlier imposed $200 million fine on PG&E was “permanently suspended” to ensure that the fine’s payment did not reduce the funds to meet the claims of wildfire victims. Both the proposals will be put to vote next month, CPUC said. A U.S. bankruptcy judge in December approved PG&E’s $13.5 billion settlement with victims of the deadly California wildfires. Last month, the company had announced some new commitments in its reorganization plan to emerge from bankruptcy to meet concerns raised earlier by California Governor Gavin Newsom.

Victims counting on PG&E Corp.’s bankruptcy to compensate them for their losses in California wildfires are making a last-ditch effort for court protection against gyrations in the utility’s share price in the virus-infected stock market, Bloomberg News reported. Lawyers for a committee representing the victims want a guarantee that half of their $13.5 billion settlement with the bankrupt utility to be paid in stock is really worth $6.75 billion when they get the shares. Having failed to persuade the judge overseeing PG&E’s bankruptcy to sanction their effort, the lawyers yesterday sought a different federal judge in San Francisco to “carefully word” his valuation of the settlement deal to prevent the victims from being outmaneuvered by PG&E’s attorneys. The judge’s intervention is required “to avoid subjecting the fire victims to a situation in which they obtain devalued stock during the coronavirus market downturn,” the lawyers said in a filing. The epidemic “is causing a devaluation of the PG&E shares intended for the fire victim trust, to a value that is lower than the required $6.75 billion value.” U.S. District Judge James Donato is tasked with confirming that PG&E’s damages to victims amount to $13.5 billion. The company argues in a filing that the committee’s request has no place in Donato’s court, calling it an attempt to “recut the deal that it agreed to” in the bankruptcy case. Besides which, the utility says, it “never agreed that the stock to be deposited into the trust would have a cash value or a market value of $6.75 billion” on the day the bankruptcy plan is effective. PG&E has warned that investors who have pledged to backstop $9 billion in equity may back out of their agreements if the power company changes the terms of its settlement with fire victims.

A judge overseeing PG&E's bankruptcy is tentatively rejecting the utility's efforts to use a trust set up for Northern California fire victims to pay off its criminal fines, KQED.com reported. The controversial approach is slated to be taken up at a bankruptcy hearing today, but U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Dennis Montali indicated his thinking in an interim order issued on Saturday. "Some things not only have to be right, but they have to look right," Montali wrote. "Telling fire victims that their money will be used to pay criminal fines and penalties does not look right even if digging through the [settlement agreement or bankruptcy] plan would lead to that literal result." Judge Montali said. "This not only looks wrong, it is wrong." A PG&E spokesperson said that the utility intends to provide the necessary context in a discussion with the judge at today's hearing.