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Major League Baseball’s Houston Astros and the National Basketball Association’s Houston Rockets are fighting to cut partner Comcast Corp.’s claim for a $100 million loan to the bankrupt cable network that televises the teams’ games, Bloomberg News reported on Friday. The largest U.S. cable provider would have its claim reduced to as little as $16 million and no more than $23 million under a revised restructuring plan filed yesterday for Houston Regional Sports Network LP, which is jointly owned by the teams and Philadelphia-based Comcast. The sports network filed a plan this month to exit bankruptcy protection and ditch Comcast for AT&T Inc. and DirecTV in a deal for them to buy all of the reorganized company’s equity and sign new media rights agreements with the teams. The new media rights deals would more than double the network’s availability in its home market and more than triple affiliation-based revenue, according to the restructuring plan.

Energy Future Holdings Corp. yesterday successfully fended off questions from creditors anxious to probe the financial health of a company division that is the target of deal talks, the Wall Street Journal reported today. The questions arose in a brewing court fight over whether Energy Future owes millions of dollars of premiums on $4 billion worth of debt attached to the division, which owns an 80 percent stake in the Texas transmission business, Oncor. At some point, that fight may turn on the question of whether the division is solvent. The answer to that question is in the works, as Energy Future engages in talks aimed at selling the Oncor stake, probably by way of a complex transaction worked into a chapter 11 restructuring plan.

Michael Rose, president of Mokena-based Location Finders International Inc., asked U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Carol Doyle to dismiss the chapter 11 case he initiated last month, saying in a court filing that he and U.S. Bank N.A. have negotiated a settlement that permits him to maintain control of his businesses, Crain’s Chicago Business reported today. Rose has just $33.6 million in assets, but owes the Minneapolis-based lender U.S. Bank $68 million, the largest share of his total debt load of $170 million, according to a court filing. Under the settlement, Rose will pay U.S. Bank about $11 million in cash and property between now and January 2017. In addition, he has agreed to relinquish real estate that the bank is trying to seize through foreclosure.

Freedom Industries Inc., the company behind a chemical spill that contaminated a significant swath of West Virginia's water supply, filed a creditor-payment plan that aims to start resolving the claims brought by those affected by the spill, the Wall Street Journal reported today. Freedom Industries in a Monday court filing provided an outline of its plan, on which creditors must eventually vote. That includes general unsecured creditors, who would receive nearly a dime for every dollar of the approximately $8.5 million they are owed. The proposal is buoyed by two recent settlements. The first is a $2.9 million compromise with attorneys representing local residents and businesses, with the money earmarked for health studies, water testing or other projects to benefit individuals as well as the businesses that were forced to close in the wake of the spill. The settlement would end about two dozen lawsuits filed against Freedom Industries. The other deal is one Freedom Industries struck in June with AIG Specialty Insurance Co., which provided insurance coverage to Freedom Industries before the Jan. 9 spill. The agreement calls for AIG to pay nearly $3 million to Freedom Industries, which has faced a number of claims in connection with the spill, from civil lawsuits to cleanup costs.

Momentive Performance Materials, the quartz and silicone maker owned by Apollo Global Management, will embark Monday on a week of hotly contested hearings seeking court approval of a plan to cut $3 billion in debt and exit bankruptcy, Reuters reported today. The Waterford, N.Y.-based company filed for chapter 11 protection in April with an agreement to transfer control to a class of bondholders, but most other creditors have vigorously opposed the plan. Bankruptcy Judge Robert Drain has set aside four days this week — Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday — to hash out the disputes in his courtroom and decide whether to approve the plan. The deal is premised on a $1.3 billion loan from JPMorgan Chase & Co. and a $600 million rights offering available to holders of second-lien bonds, who would walk away with Momentive's equity.

Junior creditors of Energy Future Holdings can review company financial records, a judge ruled yesterday, as the bankrupt Texas utility trudges through an increasingly complicated bankruptcy, Reuters reported yesterday. Granting a request from second-lien bondholders of Energy Future's TCEH power generation unit, bankruptcy Judge Christopher Sontchi endorsed broad discovery procedures at a hearing in his Delaware courtroom, mostly centered on transactions that occurred before Energy Future's chapter 11 filing in April. The move could herald future litigation in what is already a tangled case. Wilmington Savings Fund Society, the trustee for the second-lien group, wants to study Energy Future's collapse with an eye toward determining if certain transactions can be unwound due to fraud or other improprieties. Energy Future, the former TXU Corp, is the product of a record-breaking $45 billion buyout in 2007 by KKR & Co., TPG Capital Management and the private equity arm of Goldman Sachs. It filed for chapter 11 after years of lower-than-forecast power prices to restructure more than $40 billion in debt.

Lawyers for General Motors Co. customers are jostling to lead lawsuits over faulty ignition switches, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. Car owners suing over the lost value of recalled vehicles have yet to learn whether they can claim $10 billion, a few hundred thousand dollars, or nothing. That number will be decided later this year by Bankruptcy Judge Robert Gerber, who presided over GM’s bailout in 2009. Meanwhile about 100 delayed cases are in the hands of U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman in Manhattan. He told the customers yesterday at his first court conference that he will advance their suits as fast as possible, and encourage settlements, while at the same time try not to get in Judge Gerber’s way.

Philip Falcone’s LightSquared Inc., the bankrupt wireless company, is again the subject of competing plans over how to reorganize its business, with a potential hearing in October to confirm a final plan, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. Bankruptcy Judge Shelley Chapman said yesterday that she would consider a date around Oct. 20 to weigh arguments over how to reorganize the company, which previously narrowed three plans down to one, only to see it fail to win court approval. Judge Chapman said that she may have to “pick between or among two or three confirmable plans” after Falcone’s investment firm, Harbinger Capital Partners LLC, filed a new plan today, four days after LightSquared filed its own. Mast Capital Management LLC has said that it may put forth its own proposal, which would split up the company and separately reorganize debt at the “Inc.” and “LP” divisions, which have different lenders and own different rights to wireless spectrum.

The finger-pointing over who was responsible for the collapse of Lehman Brothers continues nearly six years after the firm filed for bankruptcy at the height of the financial crisis, the New York Times DealBook blog reported yesterday. Now, an arbitration panel has dealt with the liability of one of those parties, finding no basis for a malpractice claim against Ernst & Young, the big accounting firm that audited Lehman’s books. The panel of three former judges ruled in April that it was Lehman’s management, not Ernst & Young, that was most responsible for setting in motion and maintaining a controversial accounting maneuver that allowed the firm to temporarily move tens of billions of dollars in debt off its balance sheet at the end of every quarter. The previously unreported ruling could complicate a pending lawsuit the New York attorney general’s office filed against Ernst & Young in 2010 over the collapse of Lehman. The lawsuit accused the company of helping Lehman engineer an accounting fraud that made it look less leveraged than it truly was in the months before its collapse in September 2008.

MF Global Holdings Ltd. is urging a judge not to toss its $1 billion lawsuit against PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC) for the alleged bad accounting advice that MF Global says led to its 2011 collapse, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported today. In a filing last week with the U.S. District Court in Manhattan, lawyers for the administrator in charge of MF Global fought PwC's argument that MF doesn't have the standing to sue PWC. PWC argued in a May court filing that only MF Global 's litigation trustee, who is in charge of pursuing certain lawsuits on behalf of creditors, has standing to file the suit. MF Global says its administrator also has the right.