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Creditors of Excel Maritime Carriers Ltd. say that bondholders are preparing a rival turnaround plan for the shipping company, which has pledged itself to a bank-backed chapter 11 plan, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported today. Excel’s proposed plan is designed to preserve the control of owner Gabriel Panayotides while leaving convertible bondholders who are owed $100 million and unsecured creditors with a slim and chancy recovery. Members of Excel’s unsecured creditors’ committee have protested Excel’s bid to lock in senior lender control by way of bankruptcy financing and said in court filings that they would prefer to wait to see what the bondholders propose to do for them.

Bankruptcy Judge Shelley Chapman yesterday signed off on a deal for Russian oil giant Lukoil to pay $93 million to its former Getty Petroleum Marketing Inc. unit to resolve a trial over Getty’s collapse, Reuters reported yesterday. Getty, a gas station operator, declared bankruptcy in December 2011, eventually appointing a trustee, Alfred Giuliano, to liquidate its assets and pay back creditors. A key piece of Giuliano’s strategy was to sue Lukoil, saying the company stripped Getty of its best gas stations and exacerbated its insolvency. The sides reached a settlement earlier this month, halting a trial after 17 days of testimony. Giuliano alleged that Lukoil moved Getty’s most profitable stations to another subsidiary in 2009 in exchange for $120 million, far less than what Getty felt the assets were worth. Under the settlement, Lukoil will pay the Getty estate an extra $93 million, resolving both the trial and a separate dispute between the parties over the allocation of tax benefits, court documents show.

Residential Capital LLC’s unsecured creditors’ committee says that a request by dissident bondholders to disqualify “conflicted” attorneys from a fight over interest payments is driven by “a desire to create maximum disruption,” Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported today. ResCap creditors said in a court filing on Friday that the company’s junior bondholders stand to be treated well under the company’s creditor payback plan but still want to “threaten the estates with a doomsday scenario.”

A bankruptcy judge has thrown out a $2.3 billion whistleblower lawsuit accusing Hawker Beechcraft Inc. of conspiracy involving allegedly defective parts used in planes sold to the U.S. government, the Wall Street Journal’s Bankruptcy Beat blog reported on Saturday. Bankruptcy Judge Stuart M. Bernstein said that plaintiffs missed the deadline for preserving their attempt to recoup money for taxpayers in the company’s bankruptcy, even though the company never sent notice of the date. The whistleblowers should have figured out that the deadline by which they were supposed to assert their lawsuit was one of the few types of actions that would not be erased in the aircraft-maker’s bankruptcy, according to the decision issued on Wednesday by Judge Bernstein.

A judge signed off Friday on Residential Capital LLC’s deal with the Federal Reserve Board to set aside $230 million for borrowers who may have had their homes improperly foreclosed upon, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported today. The deal approved by Bankruptcy Judge Martin Glenn replaces a costly and drawn-out review process that sent millions to the professionals investigating the foreclosed loans and little or nothing to most borrowers who may have been wronged.

Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. said in filings it expects to collect another $3.2 billion from the workout of its derivatives book through 2015, of which $2.3 billion should come in the remainder of 2013, Dow Jones Newswires reported on Saturday. The failed investment banking powerhouse, which filed for bankruptcy in September 2008, is still negotiating with 1,000 of the 6,500 counterparties it had on the original derivatives portfolio, which had a $39 trillion notional value. Since 2008, the firm has recovered more than $15 billion from those derivatives. What remains is a fraction of the original face value, and the counterparties range from large, sophisticated financial institutions and hedge funds to municipalities and nonprofits.

Struggling from the fallout of federal immigration audits, two Southwest grocery-store chains have filed for bankruptcy protection with plans to reorganize, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday. California’s Mi Pueblo grocery store operator filed for chapter 11 protection on July 22 after the 21-store chain was told to replace some of its 3,260 workers whose documentation came under review during a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement audit, according to court papers filed with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in San Jose, Calif. The chain—which stocks its shelves with imported foods from Mexico, South America and other countries for its primarily Hispanic customers—said in court papers that the federal audit led the company to struggle with higher payroll costs and training expenses as new workers have been brought on board, said bankruptcy attorney Robert Harris in court documents. The stores sell fresh tortillas, marinated cuts of meat and specialty cheeses from throughout Central and South America. That filing comes after executives at Pro’s Ranch Market put the company’s 11 stores, which employ about 2,235 workers and are mostly located in Arizona, under bankruptcy protection in May.

American Airlines parent AMR Corp. and US Airways Group Inc. are beginning a series of important meetings with U.S. antitrust regulators, dubbed “the end game” that could shape the details of the world’s largest airline merger, the Wall Street Journal reported today. U.S. Department of Justice staffers who have been reviewing the planned merger for nearly six months will use the meetings with the carriers and their lawyers to go over the government’s questions and concerns, possibly raising the prospect of concessions to win its backing. The U.S. meetings come as American and US Airways offered to divest a pair of daily slots at London’s Heathrow Airport in order to win European Union backing for their planned merger. The two airlines, which announced their merger plan in mid-February, have said that they expect the deal to win antitrust approvals and hope to close the transaction in the third quarter. The deal, which provides AMR a route out of bankruptcy-court protection, currently is being voted on by AMR’s creditors and is slated for a possible confirmation hearing in bankruptcy court on Aug. 15.

American Roads LLC, which operates highways including the mile-long Detroit Windsor Tunnel linking the U.S. with Canada, is seeking bankruptcy court protection, citing $830 million in debt related to swaps and bonds, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. The Detroit-based company listed more than $100 million in assets in chapter 11 papers filed yesterday. The filings “are not the result of the recent bankruptcy filing of Detroit, although Detroit’s financial situation has contributed to the difficulties,” Chief Executive Officer Neal Belitsky said in court papers. Traffic-related revenue declines from toll operations, most in Alabama, involve “the economic recession, the volatility of gas prices, reduced travel and discretionary spending,” toll increases, Congressional mandates for increased documentation, and events including the Deepwater Horizon BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a tornado “and a declining population in the Detroit area,” Belitsky said.

The U.S. bankruptcy case of Taiwan-based shipping company TMT Group can proceed under chapter 11 protection, a judge ruled on Tuesday, affirming that the case was filed in good faith, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported today. The ruling this week from Bankruptcy Judge Marvin Isgur allows the company to move forward with its plan to cut its debt load by $1.46 billion and increase the efficiency of its business while protecting its ships, many of which are arrested in ports around the world.