Good day and welcome to WSJ Pro Bankruptcy's Daily Briefing. It's Monday, November 7. In today's newsletter, we examine the Georgia-based, India-focused payments company Ebix and its legal fights with short-sellers who allege that its accounting overstates its revenues. Lenders to Hornblower Group, which operates New York City's public ferry system, are preparing for debt talks, Pro Bankruptcy reports.

And in markets, funding for mergers, buyouts and other deal-making is drying up on Wall Street as the cost of borrowing ticks higher.

India-focused payments firm Ebix races to raise cash. Payments and software company Ebix Inc. is seeking to raise cash to pay back some $600 million in debt due early next year, but time is running short as it awaits regulatory approval for a public offering in India while facing allegations of improper accounting from short sellers.

Nasdaq-listed Ebix, based in Johns Creek, Ga., today does the majority of its business in India. Once an enterprise software company for the insurance industry, it rapidly transformed into an international payments and software business through a series of debt-funded acquisitions in India under longtime Chief Executive Robin Raina.

The rapid growth abroad is threatening to come to an abrupt stop, as a cooling market for Indian startups and allegations of accounting impropriety from short sellers are putting obstacles in front of the company’s ability to raise cash and repay the debt due next year.

Lenders prep for debt talks with New York City ferry operator. A group of lenders to cruise and ferry operator Hornblower Group Inc. has hired a legal adviser to help negotiate with the company about reworking its debt load, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

The lender group has hired law firm Shearman & Sterling LLP to handle expected talks with Hornblower, which is backed by private-equity firm Crestview Partners LP, the people said. San Francisco-based Hornblower is preparing to refinance debt to mitigate a slow recovery of ridership for its vessels, they said. The company’s operations include American Queen Voyages overnight cruises, city cruises in New York, San Francisco and other locales, and NYC Ferry, a public ferry network in New York.

Deal funding dries up. The price of borrowed money is going up along with interest rates, hurting U.S. companies that racked up debt for much of the past decade when rates were near zero. Bankers and private-equity firms have gone from funding takeovers at lofty prices with ease to scrambling to raise debt at any price. New stock sales, debt raises and corporate mergers all slowed to a trickle in recent weeks. And if the tensions that are weakening financial markets spread into the broader economy, an extended cycle of corporate defaults could follow.

• Fed tags inflation as top financial risk. Elevated and persistent inflation is among the greatest near-term risks to the U.S. economy and financial system, the Federal Reserve said.

Rochester Diocese scraps insurer deal, pledges $55 million to sex-abuse claimants. The Diocese of Rochester reached a $55 million deal to compensate 475 individual claims of childhood sex abuse while scrapping an earlier pact with its insurers and allowing abuse victims to pursue litigation to unlock additional insurance payouts.

The deal announced Thursday marks a new phase in the three-year-old bankruptcy case and ends an earlier settlement between the New York diocese and its insurers, which had agreed to pay more than $107 million to compensate victims.

Historically, most chapter 11 plans for dioceses and religious orders have received support from both abuse victims and insurance companies. But some institutions looking to resolve mass sex-abuse claims through chapter 11 have in recent years been forging deals with abuse plaintiffs that empower them to pursue litigation against insurers.

• Earlier: Catholic Diocese Bankruptcies Drag On as Insurers Fight Rising Costs of Sex-Abuse Claims

Bitcoin mining hardware goes for sale on discount. With bitcoin down 70% from a year ago, crypto mining companies’ expenses have largely overwhelmed their revenue. For some, the only move to raise cash and cover debt expenses is to sell their hardware.

Some crypto mining companies are selling pricey computing hardware they just recently bought. That is attracting distressed-asset buyers looking to capitalize on defaults in the bitcoin mining industry. It can still be profitable for companies that don’t have high debt loads, and as some miners shut down, others are filling the void.

Ex-MoviePass execs charged with fraud. Former MoviePass CEO J. Mitchell Lowe and Theodore Farnsworth, who led Helios & Matheson Analytics Inc., the movie-subscription company’s parent at the time, were accused in a federal indictment of engaging in a fraudulent scheme to inflate the company’s stock and attract new shareholders.

MoviePass, a Netflix-like subscription service for movie theaters, made a splash in 2017 when it launched, giving users the chance to watch a movie a day in a theater for $9.99 a month. The indictment alleges that both men knew the monthly offer wasn’t sustainable and promoted it to drive up the Helios stock price.

Sixth Street collects $4.4 billion to capitalize on market disruption. Investment firm Sixth Street Partners collected $4.4 billion across two new funds focused on investments in growing software companies, as the sector enters a period of greater market dislocation.

The San Francisco firm raised $3.6 billion for Sixth Street Growth Partners II LP to back noncontrolling stakes in later stage growth companies and a further $800 million for a related sidecar fund focused on growth deals in companies that are smaller and at earlier stages. Sixth Street can also tap a roughly $26 billion multistrategy, evergreen fund it manages to co-invest in deals alongside the growth vehicles.

• Kirkland lays off deal associates. Kirkland & Ellis has let go of multiple corporate associates in Texas following performance reviews amid a downturn in corporate work and overcapacity of transactional hires, Law.com reports.

Share your tips, suggestions and feedback with the WSJ Pro Bankruptcy team: Soma Biswas; Alexander Gladstone; Jodi Xu Klein; Akiko Matsuda; Jonathan Randles; Alexander Saeedy; Andrew Scurria; Becky Yerak. 

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