Electronic bingo company GameTech International Inc. is asking a bankruptcy court to approve bid rules that name its secured lender as the lead bidder at an auction next month, Dow Jones DBR Small Cap reported today. Yuri Itkis Gaming Trust's bid for GameTech is a credit bid, which exchanges the $16 million GameTech owes the trust for all of GameTech's assets and provides an additional $2.5 million in bankruptcy financing to keep the company running during its chapter 11 case.
SCO Group, the company behind a number of lawsuits relating Linux, has filed for chapter 7 bankruptcy, Wired.com reported yesterday. SCO Group already filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2007. SCO Group, originally known as Caldera, acquired assets of a UNIX vendor called Santa Cruz Operations in 2000. Since 2003, the outfit has sued several companies — notably IBM, Novell and Red Hat — claiming that these companies offer Linux distributions that infringe SCO Group’s Unix related copyrights. SCO Group has had little success in court. In 2010, courts ruled in Novell's favor and decided that the rights to Unix never transferred to SCO. Nonetheless, the company moved to reopen the case against IBM again late last year.
Opening bids for Eastman Kodak Co.'s digital patents came in far below the $2.6 billion the company said that they could be worth, the Wall Street Journal reported today. Kodak received two bids from investor groups pitting Silicon Valley giants Apple Inc. and Google Inc. against each other ahead of an auction set for Wednesday. The bids from the two teams came in around $150 million to $250 million. The low starting offers mean Kodak will need the consortiums to be extra aggressive if it is to reap enough to repay creditors and have some left over for reorganizing its operations. At a bankruptcy court hearing in January, a lawyer for Kodak said that the company thought the patents were worth $2.2 billion to $2.6 billion. Read more. (Subscription required): http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100008723963904435171045775735513867181…
In related news, Judge Allan L. Gropper yesterday cleared Eastman Kodak Co. to pay up to $4.5 million in bonuses to 12 top executives and senior managers, along with a one-time cash payment of up to $1.5 million to its chief operating officer, Dow Jones Newswires reported yesterday. Co-President and Chief Operating Officer Laura G. Quatela can earn between $600,000 and $1.5 million based on how much money Kodak raises in an upcoming auction of its patent portfolio and how quickly such a sale closes. Read more: http://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/2012/08/06/judge-clears-kodak-to-…
Eastman Kodak Co. can proceed with the sale of a key digital imaging patent, a bankruptcy judge ruled yesterday, saying that Apple Inc. waited too long to raise a claim of infringement, Reuters reported yesterday. Bankruptcy Judge Allan Gropper approved the sale of the '218 patent, which Kodak considers one of the most important of the more than 1,100 patents it hopes to sell this month. Judge Gropper also cleared the way for Kodak to sell a second patent Apple had disputed, known as the '335 patent. He said that it was premature to give Kodak the right to sell several other patents, saying that he needed more information to decide the companies' respective rights.
Bankrupt Energy Conversion Devices Inc. and its wholly owned unit United Solar Ovonic LLC have received a court's confirmation for their joint liquidation plan, Reuters reported yesterday. According to the plan, a trust will complete the liquidation of Energy Conversion and its unit's assets and distribute the cash to creditors of each company on a consolidated basis. Warranty claims will be settled by a warranty trust, which along with the liquidation trust will be managed by a committee of selected creditors. The confirmation order is expected to become final on Aug. 14, assuming there are no appeals before that time.
Solyndra LLC, the solar panel maker that received $535 million in federal loan guarantees before filing for bankruptcy last September, has filed a chapter 11 reorganization plan, Reuters reported yesterday. The proposed plan will take virtually all the remaining assets of the company and put them into the Solyndra Residual Trust. One of the plan's sponsors is Argonaut Ventures I, LLC, one of the company's largest debtors and an investment vehicle of the George Kaiser Family Foundation of Tulsa, Oklahoma. The other is Madrone Partners LP. The case is Solyndra LLC, Case No. 11-12799, U.S. Bankruptcy Court, District of Delaware.
Laser developer and manufacturer Deep Photonics Corp . filed for chapter 11 on Friday amid a dispute with its former chief executive, who the company says violated his contract and unlawfully used trade secrets, Dow Jones DBR Small Cap reported yesterday. The company did not provide specific reasons for entering chapter 11 in court documents, but said that the $500 million laser market is underserved and is expected to grow 30 percent in the next five years.
Claims traders are peppering former Nortel Networks Corp. employees with offers to pay 70 cents, 80 cents or more for their bankruptcy claims, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday. Nortel collapsed in January 2009, leaving many without jobs and without severance pay in a rocky economy. Now Nortel is sitting on some $9 billion in cash and has begun to sift through employee claims, sending out notices that say what the company thinks those claims are worth. Nortel says that the money in its deferred-compensation plan belongs to its creditors. It wanted to settle with deferred compensation claimants, anyway, because they are entitled to file claims as unsecured creditors. Settling would help the former employees cash in at the claims traders, according to Nortel. Not really, said Bernstein Shur Sawyer & Nelson LLP's Robert Keach, who has been hired by about half the deferred-compensation claimants to battle Nortel for the cash. Nortel's deferred-compensation claimants are not unsecured creditors, according to Keach. The money in the deferred-compensation fund belongs to them, not to Nortel, he contends.
Bids for patents being auctioned by Eastman Kodak Co. could become less generous now that the company has lost a key intellectual-property case against Apple Inc. and Research In Motion Ltd., the Wall Street Journal reported today. The International Trade Commission dismissed the onetime film giant's complaint against the iPhone and BlackBerry makers late Friday, after concluding that a patent that has been highly lucrative for Kodak was invalid. While the patent — governing the way images are previewed by digital cameras — is only one of 1,100 Kodak has put on the block, the high-profile loss could make it harder for the company to raise the billions of dollars it is counting on to help it emerge from chapter 11 as a viable company. The loss at the ITC comes at a crucial time for Kodak, which just kicked off the much-anticipated patent sale this month. Bidders are coming up with offers now, and the auction itself is expected during early August. Kodak has said the patents on the block could be valued at $2.6 billion.
A federal appeals court has revived a lawsuit accusing Grant Thornton LLP of defrauding shareholders and bondholders of a broadband services company it had audited, and which went bankrupt during the telecom bubble a decade ago, Reuters reported yesterday. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit said that a lower court was wrong to dismiss claims that Grant Thornton deliberately ignored signs of fraud at Winstar Communications Inc., one of its largest clients, when vetting its financial statements for the 1999 fiscal year. Yesterday's decision reversed a September 2010 ruling by U.S. District Judge George Daniels in Manhattan. The case will return to the district court.
