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S&P Global Ratings analysts said that renewable energy suppliers that depend on PG&E Corp. are still being paid in full after the California utility’s bankruptcy but aren’t likely to climb out of junk territory anytime soon, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Green-energy producers are vulnerable to more potential downgrades as the impact on their finances from PG&E’s bankruptcy restructuring comes into focus, S&P analysts said on Friday. Several power suppliers that rely on PG&E for most or all of their revenues have already been downgraded, reflecting fears the utility may use bankruptcy law to cancel or renegotiate billions of dollars in energy purchase deals. PG&E hasn’t yet signaled which supply agreements it wants to keep and which to discard. The utility likely “will not make an immediate decision,” meaning years of potential uncertainty for some projects, said S&P analyst Anne Selting. Read more.

In related news, a major battery storage project that would help California replace three of its natural gas power plants may need to be scrapped as a result of PG&E Corp’s bankruptcy, Reuters reported. Californian electricity and gas supplier PG&E filed for bankruptcy protection in January, in anticipation of significant expected liabilities from wildfires in the state. The bankruptcy poses a threat to California’s climate change ambitions by putting in limbo dozens of large solar, wind, and other clean energy projects PG&E has contracted with other companies. Because PG&E can reject contracts in bankruptcy, energy developer esVolta LP said in papers filed with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in San Francisco on Wednesday that it feared it would not be able to line up financing for its 75 megawatt Hummingbird battery storage project. “Hummingbird’s position is becoming untenable,” esVolta said in the filing, noting PG&E had said it was not in a position to make a decision on whether to keep or reject its contract for using the planned battery-storage facility. Read more. 

Philip Morris International Inc.’s Canadian division received creditor protection in Canada, a move that holds off legal action against the largest tobacco company in the country, Bloomberg News reported. Rothmans, Benson & Hedges Inc. was granted protection by the Ontario Superior Court under Canada’s Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act, the Canadian division said on Friday in a statement. The move includes an initial order to stay proceedings in a Quebec class action suit and other pending litigation, including those brought by all 10 Canadian provinces tied to the recovery of health-care costs, the company said. Class action lawsuits filed by Quebec smokers already prompted two other tobacco companies to seek creditor protection after they were ordered to pay damages of about C$17 billion ($12.7 billion). British American Tobacco Plc, Philip Morris and a local unit of Japan Tobacco Inc. are defendants in lawsuits by Canada’s 10 provinces that want to recoup health-care costs linked to the effects of smoking, a move reminiscent of the U.S. in the 1990s. The first of these cases, some of which date back almost two decades, is scheduled to come to trial this year.

Gun-maker Remington can be sued over how it marketed the rifle used to kill 20 children and six educators at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012, a divided Connecticut Supreme Court ruled yesterday, the Associated Press reported. In a 4-3 decision, justices reinstated a wrongful-death lawsuit against Remington and overturned the ruling of a lower court judge, who said the entire lawsuit was prohibited by a 2005 federal law. The majority said that while most of the lawsuit’s claims were barred by the federal law, Remington could still be sued for alleged wrongful marketing under Connecticut law. The plaintiffs in Connecticut include a survivor and relatives of nine people killed in the massacre. They argue that the Bushmaster AR-15-style rifle used by Newtown shooter Adam Lanza is too dangerous for the public and that Remington had glorified the weapon in marketing it to young people, including those with mental illness. Remington filed for bankruptcy reorganization last year amid years of slumping sales and legal and financial pressure over the Sandy Hook school massacre.

The judge presiding over the bankruptcy of PG&E Corp. is worried that another year of wildfires could upend the utility’s efforts to pull out of massive financial and legal trouble, the Wall Street Journal reported. Judge Dennis Montali cited the possibility that blazes this year, with PG&E under chapter 11 protection, could tip the utility into default on the $5.5 billion bankruptcy loan he has been asked to approve. “There’s an elephant in the room here. We all know there could be 2019 wildfires,” Judge Montali said at a hearing in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in San Francisco where PG&E and its lenders are seeking approval of the loan. Led by JPMorgan Chase & Co., lenders have offered concessions, but approval of the loan has been held in limbo while wildfire claimants examine the revised financing deal. If an official committee representing people with damages from the fires agrees to drop its objections, the loan will be approved. If the committee rejects the compromise deal, Judge Montali said, he will decide whether to approve the loan over its objection.

Purdue Pharma’s chief executive said that the company is considering bankruptcy as it faces a cascade of lawsuits alleging that the drugmaker played a key role in driving the nation’s opioid crisis, including aggressively and deceptively marketing the powerful painkiller OxyContin, the Washington Post reported. Purdue’s president and chief executive, Craig Landau, said that the company has not yet decided whether to file bankruptcy, but he said that it is something the company is weighing as it considers the impact of potential legal settlements or jury verdicts that could cost tens of billions of dollars. Purdue has denied the allegations lodged against it in court and is mounting a vigorous defense. Most of the lawsuits are consolidated in a federal court in Cleveland, where settlement talks have been ongoing for more than a year as lawyers simultaneously prepare for two trials scheduled for the fall.

A California jury yesterday awarded $29 million to a woman who said that asbestos in Johnson & Johnson’s talcum-powder-based products caused her cancer, Reuters reported. The verdict, in California Superior Court in Oakland, marks the latest defeat for the healthcare conglomerate facing more than 13,000 talc-related lawsuits nationwide. J&J said it would appeal, citing “serious procedural and evidentiary errors” in the course of the trial, saying that lawyers for the woman had fundamentally failed to show its baby powder contains asbestos. The New Brunswick, New Jersey-based company denies that its talc causes cancer, saying numerous studies and tests by regulators worldwide have shown that its talc is safe and asbestos-free. The lawsuit was brought by Terry Leavitt, who said she used Johnson’s Baby Powder and Shower to Shower — another powder containing talc sold by J&J in the past — in the 1960s and 1970s and was diagnosed with mesothelioma in 2017. It was the first of more than a dozen J&J talc cases scheduled for trial in 2019. Leavitt’s trial originally included J&J’s talc supplier, Imerys Talc America, a unit of Imerys SE, as a co-defendant. California Superior Court Judge Brad Seligman, who oversaw the trial, told jurors in February that the company was no longer part of the case after it filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection under the weight of the talc litigation, which stayed lawsuits against it.

California wildfire victims say PG&E Corp. shouldn’t be allowed to draw on a bankruptcy financing package unless it agrees to provide emergency funding for the hard-hit city of Paradise and people left homeless by the blazes, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. In bankruptcy court papers filed on Monday, the San Francisco utility said that it is considering setting up a housing fund to aid people whose homes were destroyed or damaged in wildfires. PG&E filed for chapter 11 protection in January, hoping to use bankruptcy law to deal with an estimated $30 billion in fire-damage claims. PG&E said that the housing aid shouldn’t be a condition for approval of a $5.5 billion bankruptcy finance package, which is slated for review today in bankruptcy court in San Francisco. Fire victims also are seeking a ban on lobbying by the California utility as they seek to push back against Wall Street lenders who have offered to finance the utility’s chapter 11 case. In its reply, PG&E said that it will need to interact with regulators and government bodies to work out its problems, and asked the court to reject the lobbying ban.

Priest sexual abuse survivors have until June 17 to file a proof of claim in the ongoing chapter 11 bankruptcy case filed by the Catholic Archdiocese of Santa Fe, N.M., the Albuquerque Journal reported. A Friday order by Bankruptcy Judge David T. Thuma approving the deadline for claims tasks the archdiocese with getting the word out to clergy abuse victims, primarily by publishing notices in more than 22 newspapers or other publications in New Mexico and elsewhere. “The order is the first step in what we hope will be a global resolution to provide fair compensation to all survivors of sex abuse by clergy,” said Archbishop John C. Wester of the Archdiocese of Santa Fe in a news release. Wester said the archdiocese, the largest of New Mexico’s three Catholic dioceses, is working “collaboratively” with a creditor’s committee of sex abuse survivors and “our insurers to maximize the outreach to those who might have claims.” Claims will be sealed and won’t be available to the public unless the claimant indicates otherwise. “After the claims filing deadline of June 17, 2019,” Wester stated, “we are hopeful that mediation among the survivors’ committee, insurers, archdiocese and other parties will result in a consensual plan providing an appropriate resolution for each and every claimant.”