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Matagorda Island Gas Operations LLC, a private oil and gas development company sanctioned by the U.S. for failing to comply with safety-disclosure rules put in place after the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, filed for bankruptcy protection, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. The Morgan City, La.-based company listed assets of as much as $50 million and debt of as much as $500 million in chapter 11 documents filed in court yesterday. The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement ordered Matagorda and four other companies to halt offshore oil and gas operations after they failed to give regulators an audit of safety plans required since the 2010 blowout by a BP Plc oil well and subsequent spill, according to a statement by the agency in November.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/print/2014-09-03/matagorda-island-gas-ope…

For further analysis and insight into oil and gas bankruptcy proceedings, be sure to pick up a copy of ABI’s When Gushers Go Dry: The Essentials of Oil & Gas Bankruptcy from the ABI Bookstore. Click here to purchase: http://bookstore.abi.org/when-gushers-go-dry-essentials-oil-gas-bankrup…

A bankruptcy judge has cleared a crucial settlement between the victims of Scott Rothstein's $1 billion-plus Ponzi scheme and creditors of his law firm, blessing a deal that will put money in both groups' pockets, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported today. Bankruptcy Judge Raymond B. Ray on Tuesday approved the settlement, calling it an "exceedingly fair" way to resolve the two groups' battle over the fruits of Rothstein's fraud. Since Rothstein's arrest and the bankruptcy filing of his Florida law firm in late 2009, prosecutors and bankruptcy lawyers have battled over whether Rothstein's luxury cars, watercraft, jewelry, cash, real estate and other assets were his personal property or property of the law firm.

The next chapter in the long-running saga of the Chicago Spire site will be written during the next few weeks, as creditors get their say in developer Garrett Kelleher's plan to exit bankruptcy protection and restart the project, the Chicago Tribune reported today. During hearings in bankruptcy court last week, Judge Janet Baer approved the distribution of Shelbourne North Water Street LP's proposed bankruptcy plan to creditors for voting. She also established the timetable for how events will unfold this fall to determine who will control the future of the coveted site at 400 N. Lake Shore Drive. By Sept. 29, creditors must submit votes on the plan and all objections to it must be filed. A hearing on the plan’s confirmation is scheduled for Oct. 7.

Four former Dewey & LeBoeuf executives filed new motions late last week asking the New York State Supreme Court to throw out charges of grand larceny and fraud linked to the firm’s 2012 collapse, claiming that Manhattan prosecutors failed to produce evidence of criminal intent and incorrectly instructed a grand jury about accounting rules the men are accused of abusing, the American Law Journal reported today. Dewey’s former chairman Steven Davis, former executive director Stephen DiCarmine, former chief financial officer Joel Sanders and former client relations manager Zachary Warren filed their motions on Friday following the Manhattan District Attorney’s response to their previous motions to dismiss the indictment. Lawyers for Davis, DiCarmine and Sanders wrote that “despite somewhere between one and two million emails and apparently almost 4,000 pages of grand jury testimony, the prosecutors and the grand jury have no direct evidence of these defendants’ larcenous intent.”

CRS Holding of America LLC, whose subsidiaries recycle electronics such as televisions and computers, filed for chapter 11 protection at the direction of its court-appointed receiver, Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported today. In papers filed on Friday with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Tampa, Fla., CRS, short for Creative Recycling Systems, said that it plans to use chapter 11 to stabilize its operations and then sell its business, using the proceeds to repay creditors.

The administrator for the now-defunct Coudert Brothers LLP can’t seek fees earned from former partners who now work at other firms, a federal appeals court in New York held, Bloomberg News reported today. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit yesterday reversed a ruling by U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon, who had found that “the uncompleted client matters were assets of Coudert, and as such recoverable by the bankruptcy estate.” The circuit court relied on a July 1 opinion from the New York Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, which held that the profit on unfinished business can’t be considered the property of a firm that has filed for bankruptcy. That court made the ruling because it had surfaced in the bankruptcy of Thelen LLP as well as Coudert. The administrator, Development Specialists Inc., was seeking fees from firms including Dechert LLP, Morrison & Foerster LLP and K&L Gates LLP. The group of firms is represented by Miller & Wrubel PC.

China's National Electric Vehicle Sweden, which bought bankrupt carmaker Saab in 2012, won protection from creditors from a Swedish court on Friday while it concludes funding talks, Reuters reported on Friday. The decision gives the company, which has not built any cars since May because of a shortage of money, breathing space from creditors to whom it owes some 400 million Swedish crowns (57.56 million US). Separately, Saab AB, the defense firm from which Saab Automobile was created in 1990, added to loss-making NEVS' troubles on Friday by saying that it had withdrawn its right to use the brand name Saab.

Trustee Irving Picard, who is winding down Bernard Madoff's investment firm, wants another opportunity to sue defendants that benefited from his Ponzi scheme after two major district court rulings "substantially altered the legal landscape,” Dow Jones Daily Bankruptcy Review reported today. Picard said that two rulings handed down by the U.S. District Court in Manhattan earlier this year changed the burdens he must meet to recover money from certain institutions that profited from Madoff's fraud. "Given the intervening change in law governing his claims, the trustee respectfully submits that 'justice so requires' granting him leave to replead his complaints," Picard said in papers filed in bankruptcy court on Thursday. He also is asking the court to let him take discovery from certain defendants.
http://bankruptcynews.dowjones.com/Article?an=DJFDBR0120140829ea8tmf5uw…

Don’t miss Irving Picard’s keynote, “Tales from the Madoff Bankruptcy,” at ABI’s 34th Annual Midwestern Bankruptcy Institute on Oct. 16-17 in Kansas City, Mo. Click here to register: http://www.abiworld.org/MW14/index.htm

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.

The Roman Catholic Diocese of Helena in western Montana will soon ask a bankruptcy judge to approve a key settlement with its insurance carriers that will be used to compensate about 380 individuals who allege they were sexually abused by clergy members, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday. According to a legal notice released on Thursday, a $10.9 million settlement with six insurance carriers would be used to fund a proposed $15 million compensation package. In exchange, the insurance carriers would receive immunity from any future lawsuits related to the abuse claims. Ford Elsaesser, an attorney for the diocese, said Friday that the church would formally ask Bankruptcy Judge Terry Myers for approval of the settlement within a matter of days.