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SVB Financial Group, the former parent company of failed Silicon Valley Bank, is burning through cash while it struggles to gain access to records it says are necessary to move forward in bankruptcy, Bloomberg News reported. The firm is sparring with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. over access to those records — things like minutes from board meetings — as well as $2 billion the agency seized after the bank failed in March. “There’s a category of material that the FDIC claims to have some rights over which the debtor also believes is its property,” Jim Bromley, an attorney representing SVB Financial, said during a bankruptcy hearing on Wednesday. First Citizens Bank’s purchase of SVB’s banking operations last month has complicated negotiations, he said. Bankruptcy Judge Martin Glenn expressed repeated concern over the slow pace of the case, especially given the company’s limited cash. “This process has got to move along,” Glenn said in the hearing Wednesday. “It was clear from the first-day hearing that liquidity is limited and it needs to move forward rapidly.” SVB Financial is negotiating with both the FDIC and First Citizens in order to obtain the records at issue and is close to signing a nondisclosure agreement that will aid the exchange, Bromley said.

Celsius Network LLC creditors want a bankruptcy judge to help them unmask FTX users they allege were involved in suspicious cryptocurrency trades that may have manipulated the price of Celsius’s native token last year, Bloomberg News reported. A committee representing Celsius creditors on Wednesday asked a bankruptcy judge for permission to subpoena FTX for information to identify users behind 10 cryptocurrency wallets they say engaged in a pattern of suspicious trades of Celsius’s so-called CEL coin between April and August. Celsius creditors said they need the FTX user information to determine whether the trading was legitimate “or instead a form of market manipulation, such as wash trading,” according to court papers filed yesterday. The committee said it retained blockchain consultant Elementus Inc., which identified 947 transactions over a three-day period “involving a near one-to-one relationship” between CEL token deposits and withdrawals among the 10 private crypto wallets and wallets on the FTX exchange. The CEL trades in question occurred between the date Celsius paused customer withdrawals on June 12 and the company’s chapter 11 filing on July 13, when the price of the token was 81 cents, according to court documents.

Binance.US terminated an agreement to purchase the bankrupt crypto broker Voyager Digital Holdings Ltd., less than a week after federal regulators dropped their efforts to halt the deal in court, Bloomberg News reported. The decision came after months of wrangling and the intervention of multiple federal and state regulators over the deal. In a statement, Binance.US said “the hostile and uncertain regulatory climate in the United States has introduced an unpredictable operating environment impacting the entire American business community.” “While this development is disappointing, our chapter 11 plan allows for direct distribution of cash and crypto to customers via the Voyager platform,” the company said on Twitter. “Consistent with the plan, we will now move swiftly to return value to customers via direct distributions. We will provide more information on next steps and any actions customers need to take in the coming days.” It is the second failed deal for Voyager, which has been trying to exit bankruptcy and repay its customers since filing for chapter 11 protection last year. Voyager was among the first examples of crypto platforms that Sam Bankman-Fried tried to bail out, which at the time earned him a reputation as an industry savior. In September, FTX US won an auction for Voyager assets in an agreement valued at about $1.4 billion. Mere months later, with FTX International facing bankruptcy of its own and Bankman-Fried under arrest on criminal charges, that deal collapsed. In December, Binance.US entered the fray with a proposal worth around $1 billion at the time and that would have brought in about $20 million in cash for creditors of the failed firm.

Bankrupt crypto exchange FTX has agreed to sell U.S. derivatives exchange LedgerX for $50 million, a fraction of its purchase price when FTX bought it, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. If the court overseeing FTX’s bankruptcy approves the sale, it would mark a nearly $250 million loss for FTX on its investment in LedgerX, which the company acquired for about $298 million in August 2021, according to a copy of FTX’s 2021 annual financial documents seen by The Wall Street Journal. An affiliate of Miami International Holdings Inc., which operates a number of options exchanges in the U.S., is the proposed buyer for LedgerX. Proceeds from the sale would help FTX’s new management close the $9 billion gap in customer funds it entered bankruptcy with last year. The proposed deal “is an example of our continuing efforts to monetize assets to deliver recoveries to stakeholders,” said John J. Ray III, FTX’s chief executive. In the years before FTX filed for bankruptcy, it went on a streak of investing in and buying other crypto companies. FTX, Alameda Research and other entities controlled by FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried put more than $5 billion into more than 150 startups, as well as venture firms like Sequoia Capital.

A bankruptcy judge on yesterday concluded a five-day court hearing to examine whether a chapter 11 filing of 3M Co.'s earplug unit Aearo Technologies LLC should be thrown out of court, MarketWatch.com reported. Following a federal appeals court's decision to dismiss Johnson & Johnson's first chapter 11 filing to freeze its talc lawsuits, 3M's earplug lawsuit claimants in February petitioned Judge Jeffrey Graham with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Indianapolis to dismiss Aearo's bankruptcy filing. J&J's case was dismissed because the federal appeals court deemed its bankrupt unit was not in financial distress. A significant time in the Aearo hearing was spent to argue the 3M unit's financial condition at the time of bankruptcy filing in July 2022. The judge is expected to rule in several weeks.

Cancer victims on Monday urged a U.S. judge to dismiss a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary's second bankruptcy filing, saying the company is abusing the bankruptcy system in its renewed attempt to resolve tens of thousands of lawsuits alleging that J&J's baby powder and other talc products caused cancer, Reuters reported. The J&J subsidiary, LTL Management, this month filed for bankruptcy a second time, seeking to settle all current and future talc claims for a proposed $8.9 billion. LTL's first bankruptcy was dismissed after a federal appeals court ruled the company was not in financial distress and therefore not eligible for bankruptcy. Plaintiffs have filed more than 38,000 lawsuits that have been consolidated in federal court in New Jersey alleging that J&J talc products sometimes contained asbestos and caused ovarian cancer or mesothelioma. J&J has said its talc is safe, asbestos-free and does not cause cancer. The plaintiffs allege that J&J’s actions amount to a manipulation of the bankruptcy system by a multinational conglomerate valued at more than $400 billion and in little danger of running out of money to pay cancer victims or their family members. LTL could have made a honest settlement offer after its first bankruptcy failed, but instead allowed itself to be stripped of funding so that its second bankruptcy could impose the settlement on unwilling plaintiffs and future claimants, the plaintiffs' attorneys wrote in a Monday filing in U.S. bankruptcy court in Trenton, New Jersey.

First Republic Bank and its auditor KPMG were sued by shareholders over alleged misstatements ahead of last month’s regional-banking crisis, Bloomberg News reported. The lawsuit, filed Monday in San Francisco federal court by a Florida-based public pension fund, appears to be first targeting the bank since it was crushed in early March by unprecedented outflows. First Republic, its executives and its auditor are accused of repeatedly overstating the safety of its business model even as rising interest rates undermined the value of the bank’s loan and securities portfolios. First Republic is slashing its workforce, shrinking its balance sheet and pursuing strategic options after deposits plummeted even more than analysts expected amid the crisis. The bank has been drawn into the turmoil escalated by the collapse of SVB Financial Group’s Silicon Valley Bank, which fell into government receivership in early March after asset sales spooked depositors in the venture capital community. The city of Hollywood, Fla.’s police officers’ retirement system seeks in its proposed class action to represent investors who purchased First Republic securities from January 14, 2021, to March 14, 2023. The pension fund points to the bank’s 2020 annual report, which the complaint says downplayed and concealed the risks of potential increases to interest rates, changes in its mix of deposits, and resulting deposit outflows.

The Pill Club, a birth control and telehealth provider backed by an affiliate of venture financing firm TriplePoint Capital LLC, went bankrupt after California authorities accused the startup of fraudulently billing the state’s Medicaid program for contraceptives customers didn’t order and counseling sessions it never provided, Bloomberg News reported. The San Mateo, California-based business is trying to sell itself in chapter 11 as it braces for the possibility that other states will launch additional investigations into its billing practices. The company, also known for a time as Favor, filed bankruptcy months after agreeing to pay a total of $18.275 million to settle California regulators’ claims without admitting wrongdoing. The Pill Club is finalizing an agreement to sell the business in chapter 11, a deal that would be subject to higher offers, company lawyer Timothy Walsh said Friday during a court hearing. Walsh didn’t disclose the name of the potential buyer. The startup is also discussing with TriplePoint and other parties the terms of proposed chapter 11 financing, which could be finalized over the weekend, he said. TriplePoint Venture Growth BDC Corp. is the collateral agent for a $30 million loan to The Pill Club and holds a senior lien on the company’s assets, court papers say. TriplePoint also owns shares in the startup, according to a securities filing. Walsh said The Pill Club and TriplePoint are currently at an impasse over a request to continue using lenders’ cash, though he said the company is hopeful an agreement will be reached soon. TriplePoint did agree to The Pill Club’s use of as much as $850,000 to pay wages for its approximately 220 employees, said Dan McGuire, another lawyer for startup.

A federal judge refused on Friday to recuse himself from the New Orleans Roman Catholic bankruptcy after an Associated Press report that he donated tens of thousands of dollars to archdiocese charities and consistently ruled in favor of the church in the contentious case involving nearly 500 clergy sex abuse victims. U.S. District Judge Greg Guidry told attorneys in the high-profile case that a panel of federal judges he asked to review the possible conflict determined no “reasonable person” would question his impartiality despite his contributions and longstanding ties to the archdiocese. Judge Guidry read from the opinion of the Washington-based Committee on Codes of Conduct, which noted that none of the charities he donated to “has been or is an actual party” in the bankruptcy and that Judge Guidry’s eight years on the board of the archdiocese’s charitable arm ended more than a decade before the bankruptcy. “Based upon that advice and based upon my certainty that I can be fair and impartial, I have decided not to recuse myself,” said Guidry, who oversees the bankruptcy in an appellate role.