Hutcheson Medical Center’s board of directors voted Wednesday night to file for chapter 11 protection, the Chattanooga Times Free Press reported today. Hutcheson has been unable to repay $20 million it borrowed from Erlanger Health System and is facing a threat of foreclosure. In January, Erlanger filed a civil lawsuit against Hutcheson, who was supposed to pay back the $20.5 million loan by Dec. 1 of last year.
A U.S. judge granted bankruptcy protection to China's Suntech Power Holdings Co. over an objection from the remnants of failed solar panel maker Solyndra LLC, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported today. Bankruptcy Judge Stuart M. Bernstein on Monday granted recognition to the company under chapter 15 of the Bankruptcy Code to Suntech's restructuring case in the Cayman Islands. A trust created in the aftermath of Solyndra's collapse had argued the case was filed in bad faith. The trust is suing Suntech for $1.5 billion over alleged antitrust violations.
Robert Keach, the bankruptcy trustee in the Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway case, is casting a wide net in an effort to reach into deep corporate pockets to create a fund to compensate victims and help pay the enormous costs related to the Lac-Megantic rail disaster in Quebec last year, the Bangor (Maine) Daily News reported today. In September, Keach asked a bankruptcy judge to order nine international companies to turn over all documents that discuss the sale of crude oil obtained from the Bakken Foundation in North Dakota, then shipped by truck and rail into and across Canada. The motion, granted yesterday by Bankruptcy Judge Louis Kornreich, compels ConocoPhillips, Shell Trading U.S. Co., Arrow Midstream Holdings LLC, Enersrco Energy LLC, InCorr Energy Group LLC, Marathon Oil Corp., Oasis Petroleum Inc. and QEP Resources Inc. to turn documents over to the trustee. Keach has asked for any and all communications between the companies to and from the World Services group that owned the oil that was being shipped when the train crashed. Those companies include World Fuel Services Corp.; World Fuel Services Inc.; Western Petroleum Co.; World Fuel Services, Canada, Inc.; and Petroleum Transport Solution Inc. Western Petroleum leased the train cars.
An investment fund that parked all of its money with Bernard Madoff has agreed to give up $95 million for the benefit of Madoff's victims in the second major settlement announced this week by the court-appointed official tracking down money tied to the biggest Ponzi scheme ever, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported today. The settlement with Senator Fund SPC, announced yesterday, follows a $497 million deal announced on Monday that will collect money from Herald Fund SPC and Primeo Fund, two other funds that invested with Madoff, who is currently serving a 150-year prison sentence. Both deals are subject to bankruptcy court approval.
A Montana Roman Catholic diocese has asked a judge to approve a bankruptcy reorganization plan that includes a $16.4 million settlement for hundreds of adults claiming childhood sexual abuse by clergy and lay workers, Reuters reported yesterday. The Helena diocese, serving nearly 44,500 Catholics in 57 parishes and 38 missions in western Montana, including the state capital, is the 11th U.S. diocese to file for chapter 11 protection since 2004 due to liabilities stemming from abuse claims. Under the agreement, which must be approved by a bankruptcy court, the church would contribute $2 million and its insurance carriers $14.4 million to settle claims brought by 362 people who filed two lawsuits against the diocese in 2011, said Dan Fasy, an attorney with one of four firms representing the plaintiffs. The settlement was reached after years of negotiated mediation between the church and victims of childhood sexual abuse.
Bankruptcy Judge Robert Gerber, who is overseeing part of the fallout from General Motors Co.'s problems with faulty ignition switches, will retire from the bench, but remain active in recall status for at least a year, Reuters reported yesterday. Judge Gerber will assume recall status on Jan. 1, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York announced in a statement published late on Friday. Recall status allows judges who are technically retired to continue to serve. Judge Gerber will remain on the bench at least through 2015, according to the court's announcement. The move will therefore have little immediate impact on the GM case. It will, however, allow the court to hire a new judge to fill Gerber's slot, marking the third new judgeship in less than a year in the nation's second-busiest bankruptcy court. Veteran judges Allan Gropper and James Peck retired earlier this year, and court administrators are in the process of naming replacements.
Trump Entertainment Resorts said that it expects to close down the Trump Taj Mahal resort/casino in Atlantic City, N.J., by Dec. 12, according to an amended disclosure statement filed in the bankruptcy court overseeing the company’s chapter 11 case, Forbes.com reported yesterday. Separately, the unsecured creditors’ committee in the case has filed a motion on Nov. 14 seeking to terminate the company’s exclusive period to file a reorganization plan so that the panel could file its own plan for the company. The committee’s plan would transfer the collateral securing the company’s first-lien debt to the company’s first-lien lender, (a lender controlled by Carl Icahn), pay administrative and priority claims out of the company’s $30 million of cash on hand, and transfer the company’s remaining assets (including excess cash and causes of action) to a liquidating trust for distribution to unsecured creditors (which would include Icahn’s first-lien deficiency claim).
A new legal settlement will bring in nearly $500 million for Bernard Madoff's cheated investors, putting their total recovery to date above $10 billion, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported today. Irving Picard, the court-appointed official tracking down funds stolen in the largest Ponzi scheme ever, on Monday announced that two investment funds — Herald Fund SPC and Primeo Fund — have agreed to return $497 million they received by investing with Madoff. The deal brings the total funds recovered in the liquidation of Madoff's investment firm to more than $10.3 billion, of which nearly $6 billion has been returned to investors. Investors lost $17.3 billion in principal upon the 2008 collapse of Madoff's Ponzi scheme, for which he is now serving a 150-year prison sentence.
Billionaire investor Philip Falcone’s Harbinger Capital Partners LLC is appealing a bankruptcy court ruling that derailed his proposal to reorganize LightSquared by canceling a $2.4 billion claim by a group of competing creditors and splitting the company in two, Bloomberg News reported on Friday. When Falcone’s effort failed, creditors including Dish Network Corp. Chairman Charles Ergen reached a deal on a new chapter 11 proposal that would give Ergen 60 percent of the equity in a reorganized LightSquared. Harbinger, LightSquared’s current controlling shareholder, filed a notice of appeal yesterday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan, indicating a district court judge in New York will be asked to review the Oct. 30 decision. LightSquared, based in Reston, Va., has been in bankruptcy for more than two years as the company and its lead creditors argue over the best way to reorganize. The company previously narrowed three plans to one, only to be rebuffed by the bankruptcy judge. The new Ergen-led deal, which also gives equity to lender JPMorgan Chase & Co., was the result of all-day mediation on Oct. 31 with a federal judge in Manhattan, U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Shelley Chapman said at a Nov. 3 hearing.
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear two Bank of America Corp. appeals that seek to give lenders more leverage over homeowners who file for bankruptcy protection, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. The question in the cases centers on whether homeowners can use bankruptcy liquidation proceedings as a means of wiping out, or “stripping off,” all liability on a second mortgage. Bank of America is seeking to overturn rulings by an Atlanta-based federal appeals court with jurisdiction over three Southeastern states. The lender says hundreds if not thousands of homeowners in those three states have sought to strip off the liens on their second mortgages. Other federal appeals courts around the country have refused to let homeowners wipe out second-mortgage debt in bankruptcy liquidation proceedings.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/print/2014-11-17/bank-of-america-gets-u-s…
The cases are Bank of America v. Caulkett, 13-1421, and , 14-163. For more information and court filings, please click here: http://news.abi.org/court-decisions