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The number of eligible deaths linked to the General Motors Co. faulty ignition switch rose to 84 Monday as the number of claims still under review continued to decline, the Wall Street Journal reported today. The automaker’s compensation fund, operated by Washington, D.C. attorneys Kenneth Feinberg and Camille Biros, confirmed the number of eligible death claims climbed by four people compared with the prior week. Meanwhile, the number of confirmed injury claims rose to 157 people from 148. Feinberg is moving aggressively to clear claims as GM looks to put last year’s recall of 2.6 million vehicles for faulty ignition switches behind it. Participation in the fund, which stopped accepting claims in January, is voluntary although those who take payouts waive their rights to sue the company. The number of claims still under review fell to 1,136 from 1,246. In all, 4,342 claims have been submitted before the claim window closed on Jan. 31.

California regulators imposed the largest penalty for a U.S. natural-gas utility, ordering PG&E Corp. to pay $1.6 billion for failures that led to a deadly 2010 natural gas pipeline explosion in a San Francisco suburb, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. A faulty weld on the pipeline caused an explosion and fire rupture that killed eight people and destroyed 38 homes in San Bruno, Calif. PG&E, owner of the state’s largest utility, committed 2,425 violations of safety rules in the decades leading up to the incident. The company still faces as much as $1.13 billion in federal criminal fines for the blast and has committed to spend $2.8 billion to improve pipeline safety. The San Francisco-based company had warned that an earlier staff-proposed fine of $2.25 billion would push it to the edge of bankruptcy. Since the tragedy, PG&E has replaced its chief executive officer, frozen its dividend and separated its gas business from its power operations to improve safety.

A bankruptcy judge gave permission for lawyers in charge of long-dead manufacturer Yarway Corp., which made valves and steam traps for the steam power industry, to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to individuals who said the Pennsylvania company exposed them to asbestos, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported today. The court-approved plan will split $325 million in cash from Yarway and its indirect owner, Tyco International Ltd., the fire protection and security company. The plan gives a legal shield to Tyco, which will be immune from future asbestos-related demands. (Subscription required.) http://bankruptcynews.dowjones.com/Article?an=DJFDBR0120150409eb49n4dhs&cid=32135009&ctype=ts

For further analysis of issues surrounding litigation or liquidation trusts, be sure to pick up a copy of ABI’s A Practitioner's Guide to Liquidation and Litigation Trusts from the ABI Bookstore. 

The Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, Minn., got more time to construct a financial reorganization plan Thursday when a bankruptcy court judge extended its deadline to Nov. 30, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported today. Archdiocese attorneys argued that it needed more time to work with insurance carriers and to determine a more precise number of abuse claims. The Twin Cities archdiocese has been in mediation with its creditors since filing for chapter 11 bankruptcy Jan. 16. The bankruptcy came in response to an unprecedented wave of clergy abuse lawsuits filed since 2013, when Minnesota temporarily lifted its statute of limitations on older abuse cases.

Federal regulators closed a five-year probe into failing brake lines in older General Motors Co. trucks and sport-utility vehicles without finding a manufacturing defect, underscoring the limits of the government’s ability to intervene on safety issues even amid numerous complaints, the Wall Street Journal reported today. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration instead today is issuing a safety advisory urging owners of the vehicles and all other truck, SUV and car models more than seven years old to inspect brake lines and thoroughly wash the undersides of the vehicles to remove salt and other chemicals that can lead to corrosion over time. Regulators are taking the action instead of pursuing a recall.

Citing what he said was “major progress” in the Freedom Industries bankruptcy, a federal judge on Friday called off a hearing he had scheduled to force Freedom management to explain why key aspects of the case were stalled, the Charleston (W.V.) Gazette reported on Saturday. Bankruptcy Judge Ronald Pearson had scheduled a “show cause” hearing for Freedom for next week, saying that he wanted the company’s lawyers and its chief restructuring officer, Mark Welch, to explain why the case should continue down its current path, rather than being transferred to a more traditional liquidation through chapter 7. In a two-page order, Judge Pearson noted that the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection had accepted Freedom into the state’s more flexible “voluntary” toxic-cleanup program and that DEP lawyers had reported in a motion filed on Thursday that the company and the agency had reached an agreement on a cleanup timeline. “This fact is indicative of major progress toward bringing this case towards conclusion,” the judge wrote. Judge Pearson said that the development also indicates that Freedom officials “may not be in a position to fully outline the steps and costs in an environmental remediation plan” by the scheduled hearing date of April 8.

A jury found Chrysler responsible in the death of a 4-year-old Georgia boy in a fiery Jeep crash and ordered the auto maker to pay $150 million in damages, the Wall Street Journal reported today. The verdict caps a trial that renewed scrutiny of older sport-utility vehicles with fuel tanks that regulators spotlighted as vulnerable in rear-end collisions. After deliberating for less than two hours on Thursday, the jury in Bainbridge, Ga., found the auto maker to blame for Remington Walden’s March 2012 death. The fuel tank installed behind the rear axle on the SUV he was riding in, a 1999 Jeep Grand Cherokee, leaked after a pickup truck rear-ended it, setting the vehicle ablaze. The Jeep’s manufacturer, Chrysler, is now called FCA US LLC and part of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV. The jury found that the company acted with “reckless or wanton disregard for human life in the design or sale” of the Jeep SUV and failed to warn that the vehicle was hazardous. The verdict could draw further attention to Fiat Chrysler’s handling of older sport-utility vehicles that regulators at one point linked to 51 deaths. Fiat Chrysler has so far avoided the kind of recall scrutiny received by General Motors Co. over defective ignition switches and Takata Corp. on account of rupture-prone air bags. The latter companies have faced fines from regulators, hearings on Capitol Hill and Justice Department probes over their safety problems.

Details filed this week in the bankruptcy case of Montreal Maine & Atlantic Railway Ltd., the operator of a train that crashed in Lac-Mégantic, Canada, killing 47 people, show how the company proposes splitting up that fund among several camps waiting for the money, the Wall Street Journal reported today. Government agencies, including the Province of Quebec, city of Lac-Mégantic and the Canadian government, are in line for the largest share of the funds, an estimated C$123 million. Families of those who died have been allocated C$77 million, personal-injury claims are in line for C$34 million, and those with property-damage claims should receive C$28 million. Within that C$77 million for wrongful death claims, the breakdown gets even more detailed. The 48 victims — including the 47 who died because of the crash and a first responder who committed suicide — are allocated between C$711,000 and C$3.69 million. Robert Keach, the court-appointed trustee overseeing MM&A’s bankruptcy, said on Wednesday that “no amount of money is ever going to be enough to address this tragedy, because it’s money.” Litigation continues against two parties that Keach and the victims would like to hold responsible for the crash: Canadian Pacific Railway, which transported the oil to Montreal, and oil supplier World Fuel Services Corp.

Companies are quietly eliminating a long-held employee privilege: the right to band together to take the boss to court, the Wall Street Journal reported today. As employers try to stem the costs of lawsuits, more companies are requiring workers to bring serious complaints to arbitration and forbidding employees from participating in class actions. The percentage of companies using arbitration clauses to preclude class-action claims soared to 43 percent last year from 16 percent in 2012, according to a survey of nearly 350 companies conducted by management-side law firm Carlton Fields Jorden Burt LLP. Fueling the trend is a 2011 Supreme Court ruling in AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion that upheld such agreements. The result, say lawyers on both sides of the issue, has been a notable decline in actions that accuse corporations of wage theft, discrimination, and other systemic violations of labor laws.

An insurer that was required to help fund the $3 billion bankruptcy of Pittsburgh Corning has filed court papers seeking the case to be reopened, saying that “pervasive fraudulent conduct” by asbestos plaintiff lawyers tainted the proceedings, Forbes reported today. The filing by Everest Re and its Mt. McKinley Insurance unit follows the opening of millions of pages of documents in the Garlock Sealing Technologies bankruptcy, which revealed how lawyers representing asbestos plaintiffs deliberately delayed filing claims against bankrupt companies until they had completed cases against solvent ones, in order to avoid cluttering the record with potential evidence of exposure to other firms’ products. Everest is among the insurers ordered to pay $1.7 billion into the bankruptcy trust formed to settle claims against Pittsburgh Corning, a joint venture of PPG Industries PPG and Corning that made asbestos insulation widely used in ships, refineries and other industrial settings. A judge approved the bankruptcy plan in 2013 and last year a federal district court judge rejected Everest’s challenge to the plan.