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Avaya Inc.’s recent deal to exit bankruptcy has put some of the telecom company’s pensioners at ease, but a small group stands to lose a significant portion of their retirement income, the Wall Street Journal reported today. Under a deal announced on Monday to bring Avaya out of chapter 11, benefit payments to nearly 8,000 participants in a legacy pension plan for salaried workers will be taken over by the Pension Benefit Guarantee Corp., the federal government’s retirement guarantor. For those retirees, not much would change if the deal wins court approval — they would begin receiving their monthly checks from the PBGC, the largest single creditor in Avaya’s bankruptcy, instead of the company itself. The PBGC guarantees pensions up to a certain amount depending on age; for a 65-year-old pensioner, that cap is $64,432 a year. Early analysis by the PBGC shows that 100 percent of those 8,000 retirees’ benefits are guaranteed by the agency. And payments to another 6,900 people in a separate plan covering hourly employees will remain the company’s responsibility after it surfaces from bankruptcy.

As rival tech giant Apple readies its huge new headquarters in Silicon Valley, Alphabet's Google is buying up real estate parcels like a land speculator, CNBC reported yesterday. Google, based in Mountain View, Calif., has purchased 52 properties in Sunnyvale, Calif., for $820 million from a real estate development partner, CBRE. A real estate brokerage has been quietly assembling the properties on behalf of the search giant. The purchases fill in gaps between multiple smaller campuses in Sunnyvale — the long-time home of Yahoo — that Google has purchased or leased in recent years. The move comes one month after the company won exclusive rights to negotiate with the city of San Jose for the purchase of 16 tracts of land near that city's convention center and pro hockey arena. Google, which reported on Monday that it now has more than 72,000 employees, needs room to expand as it looks to hire even more workers to sustain its growth. Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A tense scene unfolded yesterday as user-generated, music-streaming service SoundCloud held an all-hands meeting to explain to employees why it suddenly had to lay off 40 percent of its staff last week, Tech Crunch reported. Exiting team members wanted to know why they weren’t warned, while those who survived the cuts wanted assurance that the cost reductions would keep the company afloat for the long-run. But as security ominously filed into SoundCloud’s meeting rooms at its offices around the world during the all-hands video conference broadcast from its Berlin headquarters, the startup’s staff discovered they wouldn’t be getting the answers they wanted. Instead, sources at SoundCloud tell TechCrunch that founders Alex Ljung and Eric Wahlforss confessed the layoffs only saved the company enough money to have runway “until Q4” — which begins in just 80 days. That seems to conflict with the statement Ljung released alongside the layoffs, which noted that, “With more focus and a need to think about the long term, comes tough decisions.”

Oi SA has unveiled a plan that facilitates the early repayment of small debts to suppliers and contractors, as Brazil's No. 4 wireless carrier seeks to emerge faster from creditor protection, Reuters reported yesterday. The plan was made public in newspaper ads on Friday. Under its terms, all creditors will be eligible for an early repayment of their debts to a maximum limit of 50,000 reais ($15,000) each. According to Chief Executive Officer Marco Schroeder, the plan seeks Oi's so-called Classes 1, 3 and 4 of creditors to negotiate ahead of a vote on the carrier's bankruptcy plan. About 53,000 out of Oi's 55,000 creditors can be considered as small creditors, he said.

Toshiba Corp. didn’t know its U.S. nuclear subsidiary was preparing for a bankruptcy filing even after the unit had hired lawyers for the task, according to court records and Toshiba’s official timeline, the Wall Street Journal reported today. In a Nov. 30, 2016, letter, a lawyer at New York firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges LLP wrote that Toshiba unit Westinghouse Electric Co. had engaged the firm to work on “the potential filing and administration of a chapter 11 proceeding under the U.S. Bankruptcy Code.” A Toshiba spokesman, reiterating earlier statements by company executives, said this week that no one at Tokyo headquarters was aware of the potential for major losses or bankruptcy at Westinghouse until early December 2016. Toshiba Chief Executive Satoshi Tsunakawa learned of the problem in mid-December, the spokesman said. At a news conference on Dec. 27, Tsunakawa said Toshiba was facing a multibillion-dollar loss in connection with cost overruns at Westinghouse nuclear projects in the U.S. but didn’t discuss a possible bankruptcy.

Creditors of Brazil's Oi SA filed a motion this week in U.S. bankruptcy court to pressure the telephone operator to consider a proposal which could give lenders control of the restructured company, Reuters reported yesterday. The creditors believe that a U.S. filing made on Monday in the Southern District of New York will allow them the right to reject the company's reorganization plan in the United States if it is confirmed in Brazil without their input, the source said. Oi said it has no knowledge of the creditors' motion. Although Oi has no sizeable assets in the U.S., it has strategic commercial agreements with large U.S. telecom carriers related to interconnection fees.