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The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has ruled that a Texas businessman who was sentenced to two years in prison for bankruptcy fraud may use the sale of the proceeds of his house to pay his criminal defense attorneys, rejecting a U.S. bankruptcy trustee’s attempts to claim the home sale proceeds as part of his estate, Texas Lawyer reported. Curtis Harold DeBerry, the former owner of a failed produce company in Boerne, Texas, was eventually sentenced to two years in prison last year for hiding assets from creditors in bankruptcy. As part of DeBerry’s chapter 7 bankruptcy case, which he filed in 2014, he used the Texas homestead exemption law to protect his house from the bankruptcy estate. DeBerry sold his house later that year for $364,592, did not reinvest the proceeds and instead transferred the money to his wife and to San Antonio’s Goldstein Goldstein & Hilley for the benefit of Gerry Goldstein and Cynthia Orr, two firm partners who represented DeBerry in a criminal matter.

Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. caused $2.4 billion in damages to investors holding securities backed by shaky home mortgages, a New York bankruptcy judge ruled Thursday, ending one of the last remaining disputes in the defunct bank’s nearly decade-long liquidation, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Bankruptcy Judge Shelley C. Chapman’s decision marks a loss for investors, mostly hedge funds, which said their claims were worth $11.4 billion, and a win for Lehman’s bankruptcy administrators, who had proposed the $2.4 billion figure. She fixed the investors’ claim after a 22-day trial surrounding 72,500 home loans from before the 2008 financial crisis that bond trustees said were rife with misstatements about the borrowers’ income, their debts and their places of residence.