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CarVal Investors LLC, the hedge-fund subsidiary of agribusiness company Cargill Inc., said it is offering 250 million British pounds ($398 million) more than two rival hedge funds that recently agreed to buy a multibillion-dollar Lehman Brothers bankruptcy claim at a discount, Dow Jones Newswires reported yesterday. Lawyers for CarVal said on Tuesday that it would pay GBP900 million ($1.4 billion) for the bankruptcy claim against Lehman Brothers International (Europe), the U.K. arm of the collapsed investment bank. That is 38 percent more than hedge funds Elliott Management and King Street Capital Management LP have agreed to pay for the claim. CarVal's lawyers said, however, that Lehman conducted a "closed" sale process and shut out the hedge fund from bidding on the claim.

The creditors of Energy Future Holdings remain at odds over how to split the Texas power company's equity in an expected bankruptcy as their confidentiality agreements lapse, Reuters reported yesterday. Secured lenders at Texas Competitive Electric Holdings, which represents Energy Future's unregulated subsidiary, and unsecured bondholders at Energy Future Intermediate Holdings, Energy's Future's regulated subsidiary, had previously been in direct negotiations. But the EFIH unsecured bondholders have so far been reluctant to re-sign confidentiality agreements. If they do not re-sign the confidentiality agreements, the creditors and the company will make public details of their talks in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commision as early as today. The company, saddled with $40 billion of debt, wants to finalize a restructuring plan before Nov. 1, when $250 million in bond payments are due. Filing for bankruptcy before Nov. 1 would suspend the bond payments; but filing without a restructuring plan could entail years of battles and competing restructuring plans in bankruptcy court.

U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara is balking at a bid by a group of investors for payment of their legal fees out of the coffers of the bankruptcy estate of "old" General Motors, calling the request "self-interested creditor advocacy," Dow Jones Newswires reported yesterday. Bharara said in a court filing on Friday that lawyers for John Paulson's Paulson & Co. hedge-fund firm, Paul Singer's Elliott Management and other holders of GM Nova Scotia notes haven't shown that they've made a "substantial contribution" to the old GM estate, in spite of their settlement of a $2.67 billion claims fight in GM's bankruptcy case. U.S. taxpayers still owned about 7.3 percent of the Detroit auto maker as of Sept. 13, according to the Treasury Department's monthly report to Congress. The settlement put an end to a long-running legal fight involving a payment old GM made to bondholders of the Nova Scotia arm before GM's 2009 bankruptcy. After the deal was reached, lawyers for the creditors of GM's Nova Scotia unit — a group that also includes Morgan Stanley (MS), Fortress Investment Group LLC (FIG) and the trustee for GM Nova Scotia's bankruptcy estate — asked for $1.5 million of their professional fees to be paid for by old GM's estate. They argued that the settlement ended "contentious, time-consuming, and expensive litigation that stood as one of the last remaining obstacles to bringing these chapter 11 cases to a close."

As LightSquared and its various suitors prepare to meet in court today over their competing plans to bring the company out of bankruptcy, the wireless venture said that it was unable to strike a compromise with Charlie Ergen's Dish Network Corp. on the parameters of a sale, Dow Jones Newswires reported yesterday. LightSquared is set to ask Bankruptcy Judge Shelley C. Chapman to sign off on its plan to sell the company's assets under one restructuring proposal, but parties bidding on those assets disagree. Dish, which is bidding $2.2 billion for a chunk of LightSquared's wireless spectrum, wants a separate plan for that sale. LightSquared said in court papers that it tried to come to a compromise with Dish and a third group bidding on a smaller piece of the wireless-satellite company's spectrum, to "avoid waste of estate resources, duplication of effort" and market confusion. "Unfortunately, to date, LightSquared has been unsuccessful in its efforts," the company said.

A bankruptcy trustee for failed solar panel manufacturer Energy Conversion Devices is suing three Chinese companies for $950 million over allegations of price fixing and the dumping of cheap solar panels that drove the U.S. company out of business, the Wall Street Journal reported today. John Madden, who heads a trust created to recover money for Energy Conversion's creditors, said that the three companies — Trina Solar Ltd., Yingli Green Energy Holding Co. and Suntech Power Holdings Co. — engaged in a far-ranging scheme to flood the market with low-cost solar panels in an illegal bid to take over the U.S. market. The foreign manufacturers "conspired to export more than 95 percent of their production, dump their products in the U.S. at artificially low prices, and achieve market domination," Madden said in a lawsuit suit filed on Friday. The trustee is seeking to recoup $950 million in Energy Conversion's book value that was destroyed by the defendants' alleged plan to dump low-cost solar panels in the U.S.

Personal Communications Devices LLC's unsecured creditors received court approval to dig deeper into the company's junior lenders, who are also its majority owners, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported today. Bankruptcy Judge Alan Trust on Friday authorized the unsecured creditors to start probing the company and its second-lien lenders. If the company or lenders raise any concerns about the scope of the investigation that can't be resolved, Judge Trust said that he would hold another hearing on the unsecured creditors' request this Thursday.

Citigroup Inc. is firing back at Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.'s "unprecedented" bid to cut off its right to hundreds of millions of dollars in interest payments tied to Citi's $3 billion bankruptcy claim against the failed investment bank, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported today. Lehman wants Bankruptcy Judge James Peck to end what it calls Citi's "interest rate arbitrage" with respect to rival claims on billions of dollars in assets. By provisionally paying off the bank, Lehman would stem the flow of interest payments to Citi, which could total hundreds of millions of dollars by the time the two sides face off in court, which isn't expected until 2015.

Deloitte & Touche LLP settled lawsuits by Taylor, Bean & Whitaker Mortgage Corp.’s bankruptcy trustee and Deutsche Bank AG over $7.6 billion in losses associated with the collapse of the mortgage lender, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. Bankruptcy trustee Neil Luria and Taylor Bean’s Ocala Funding unit sued Deloitte in September 2011 over claims the accounting firm failed to detect a fraud that led to losses at the defunct lender. Deutsche Bank, which filed its complaint in December 2011, invested in asset-backed notes issued by Ocala based on Deloitte’s audits of Taylor Bean’s financial statements from 2005 through July 2009. The settlement comes ahead of an Oct. 21 trial in the case. Taylor Bean, once the 12th-largest U.S. mortgage lender, collapsed in 2009 after federal regulators began probing a fraud that involved fake mortgage assets, targeted the federal bank bailout program and contributed to the failure of Montgomery, Ala.-based Colonial Bank.

FriendFinder Networks Inc., the bankrupt owner of Penthouse magazine, was sued by a company that has gathered movies, photos and other works created by the publication’s founder, the late Bob Guccione, over ownership rights of the artwork and property, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. Guccione Collection LLC filed a lawsuit yesterday in bankruptcy court seeking a ruling that the posting and sale of the works online doesn’t violate FriendFinder’s intellectual property rights. Guccione Collection, headed by Jeremy Frommer, a financier and Wall Street veteran of more than two decades, was sent a notice demanding that it take down the material, according to the complaint.

Five years after Ponzi-scheme operator Tom Petters’s arrest, the recipients of his largesse are still paying for his crimes, the Wall Street Journal reported today. Following Petters’s arrest, his business empire—which once encompassed Polaroid and Sun Country Airlines—filed for bankruptcy protection. The collapse of the fraud also led to the bankruptcies of several large feeder funds, which gathered up investor dollars and funneled them to Petters. Those cases wind on, as bankruptcy trustees file clawback lawsuits to recover funds and work to track down assets to pay creditors. The trustee overseeing the bankruptcy wind-down of Petters Co., for instance, has brought more than 200 clawback suits against more than 380 defendants. So far, court papers show that the litigation has brought in $21.5 million, and more suits remain pending.