This post is about a junkyard, hogs getting slaughtered, and a bankruptcy judge poised to sanction a creditor and her counsel. The message from the case to would-be claimants in other cases is simple: do not “overreach.”In re U Lock, Inc., Case No. 22-20823, 2023 WL 308210, at *1 (Bankr. W.D. Pa. Jan. 17, 2023).
The United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit wasted no time getting the new year off to a roaring start through its ruling in In re LTL Mgmt., LLC, Case No. 22-2003, 2023 WL 1098189 (3d Cir. Jan. 30, 2023). In LTL, the Third Circuit affirmatively dismissed the so-called “Texas Two-Step” by which a solvent corporation had tried to cabin potentially billions of dollars of mass tort liability through an internal corporate restructuring.
In that ruling, the Third Circuit determined that:
“The theme is clear: absent financial distress, there is no reason for Chapter 11 and no valid bankruptcy purpose.”
Mr and Mrs Hughes had granted a tenancy of a house to Mr Howell. He did not pay all of the rent and so they instructed Eleanor Solomon of Anthony Gold who issued possession proceedings. In September 2015 a possession order and money judgment were made against him. He did not satisfy the judgment debt and a bankruptcy petition was presented.
Johnson & Johnson (“J&J”) has, for a very long time, produced and sold a baby powder product containing talc—a mineral milled into fine powder that includes traces of asbestos.
In recent years, that baby powder product has spawned a torrent of lawsuits alleging that it causes ovarian cancer and mesothelioma.
Currently, over 38,000 ovarian cancer actions and over 400 mesothelioma actions are pending against J&J. Expectations are for thousands more to be filed in decades to come.
The first reported decision on the ipso facto stay provisions of the Corporations Act provides clarity that they operate as intended in voluntary administration – leaving the trickier issues for another day.
There is seemingly, in the opinion of a great number of bankruptcy courts, a conflict between the United States Bankruptcy Code requirements that a debtor reorganize or liquidate “in good faith,” the federal Controlled Substances Act [21 USC § 841] (“CSA”) prohibiting, among other things, the distribution or sale of marijuana, and the laws of over half of the states in the country that authorize the sale of marijuana for medical and other purposes.
The Supreme Court’s recent judgment in BTI 2014 LLC v Sequana SA [2022] UKSC 25 is a significant decision for the law of directors’ duties.
On January 30, 2023, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed the bankruptcy filing by Johnson & Johnson’s subsidiary, LTL Management, LLC (“LTL”). The Circuit Court reversed the New Jersey Bankruptcy Court and held that LTL did not file the bankruptcy case in good faith and therefore was ineligible to petition the bankruptcy court for relief.