Welcome to WSJ Pro Bankruptcy's Daily Briefing. It's Thursday, March 26. In today's briefing, Georgia-Pacific’s Bestwall subsidiary is facing a new challenge to its decade-old Texas Two-Step bankruptcy as a federal watchdog petitions for an independent trustee to seize control of the restructuring and mediate a settlement for its massive asbestos liabilities.

Bankruptcy may be fading as a tool to solve mass torts, but in North Carolina a nearly decade-old asbestos case is still going strong.

Georgia-Pacific's Bestwall subsidiary—created to carry the pulp-and-paper company's asbestos liabilities into bankruptcy—has lingered since 2017, defeating several attempts by personal-injury lawyers to eject it from chapter 11. Bestwall now faces a challenge it hasn't faced before—not from tort claimants, but from government lawyers.

The Bankruptcy Administrator for the Western District of North Carolina said in court papers Tuesday that Bestwall should be run by an independent trustee with the power to control the case and propose a settlement plan. A chapter 11 trustee would act like a mediator who could negotiate terms "that he or she believes could gain the support of the divergent constituents in this case," said the administrator, a court-appointed watchdog in the states of North Carolina and Alabama.

Bestwall was the original Texas Two-Step, a chapter 11 strategy to carry tort liabilities into bankruptcy court while keeping corporate assets outside of court protection. Bestwall has said it should remain in control of its case so that it can obtain a court order estimating its total asbestos bill.

Representatives for claimants have argued the bankruptcy was filed in bad faith to reduce Georgia-Pacific's liabilities, an argument that has been repeatedly rejected by the presiding judge and the Fourth Circuit appeals court.

—Andrew Scurria

The red ink is mounting for companies in the business of slaughtering cattle.

JBS, the world’s largest meatpacker, reported a $617 million adjusted operating loss for its beef business over the past year. A year earlier, the loss was $37 million.

The largest beef processor in the U.S. by volume is among companies trudging through a nationwide cattle shortage that’s driving up prices. Beef prices for consumers and wholesalers are at record highs.

The cattle shortage also comes as a labor strike is hampering JBS’s beef production in the U.S. The strike among unionized workers, which began March 16, was the largest at a meat processing plant in decades.

U.S. import prices rose in February, driven by higher prices for both fuel and nonfuel imports, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed Wednesday.

Overall import prices rose 1.3% in February, higher than the upwardly revised 0.6% increase in January, the data showed.

That result was more than the 0.6% increase expected by a consensus of economists polled by The Wall Street Journal. Year-on-year prices were up 1.3%, the BLS said.

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