Good day and welcome to WSJ Pro Bankruptcy’s Daily Briefing. It’s Wednesday, Nov. 29. In today’s briefing, we write about the latest bankruptcy venue battle: Barretts Minerals challenges a creditor effort to move its bankruptcy from Texas to Montana, where the talc supplier is based. Panama’s top court ruled against a contract between the government and Canadian miner First Quantum Minerals, placing in jeopardy one of the world’s largest copper mines.

Talc supplier Barretts Minerals is challenging an effort by creditors, including tort claimants, to move its chapter 11 bankruptcy case from Texas to Montana, where the business is based.

Facing hundreds of personal injury lawsuits, the former Pfizer minerals business filed for bankruptcy protection in October in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Houston. Barretts supplied talc for cosmetic products alleged to have caused injuries primarily from exposure to asbestos supposedly contained in the products.

Earlier this month, the official unsecured creditors committee said the Barretts bankruptcy case should be heard in Montana, noting the company’s primary business of talc mining has occurred in Dillon, Mont., a few miles from its headquarters.

The fight over the venue for the bankruptcy case comes as some U.S. lawmakers press a yearslong effort to restrict where companies may seek protection from creditors to discourage bankruptcy filings in certain favorable locations.

Jack Cooper Transport, a specialized operator that hauls automobiles for carmakers, plans to submit a bid backed by $1 billion in financing and support from the Teamsters union and some U.S. lawmakers that would halt the liquidation of trucking giant Yellow and seek to resurrect the shuttered business, according to people familiar with the matter.

The improbable effort would require the Treasury Department to defer repayment for several years of a $700 million loan provided to Yellow under a Covid pandemic-era bailout, one of several debts that helped push one of the country’s biggest truckers into collapse earlier this year.

The latest offer from the Diocese of Rockville Centre of $200 million, excluding insurance recoveries, to compensate victims of childhood sexual abuse doesn’t have the support from victims to win approval from the bankruptcy court, a lawyer representing survivors said at a bankruptcy court hearing Tuesday.

Rockville Centre, the seat of the Catholic church in suburban Long Island, is seeking the court’s permission to present its settlement proposal to survivors for a vote. Judge Martin Glenn said Tuesday he won't allow the Diocese to present its proposed reorganization plan containing the settlement to victims without more disclosure of the finances of its parishes.

The committee representing sex abuse plaintiffs in the Diocese's chapter 11 case has sought $280 million in cash from Rockville Centre's parishes and cemeteries. The threat that Judge Glenn will dismiss the chapter 11 case has been looming for months. The Diocese has proposed to go along with dismissing the case if its proposed settlement doesn’t garner enough votes from survivors.

—Soma Biswas

Hawaiian Electric said it wasn’t sufficiently focused on wildfire risk before August’s deadly blaze on Maui and proposed nearly tripling the money it would now spend on the effort. 

The utility, in regulatory filings this week, said it had been more concerned with hurricanes than with wildfire risk before the Aug. 8 fire that killed 100 people and leveled the town of Lahaina. The company said it now wants to revise a plan to improve its power grid to focus more on wildfires.

In the initial plan, issued last year, Hawaiian Electric proposed investing roughly $190 million to strengthen power lines and equipment to account for a range of risks across the islands. The new plan proposes spending the same amount of money, but shifts resources from other areas such as hazardous tree removal to upgrades and technologies needed to address wildfire risk.

Binance’s second act starts now.

The largest global crypto exchange and its chief executive and co-founder, Changpeng Zhao, pleaded guilty last week to ignoring anti-money-laundering rules while serving U.S. customers. Binance agreed to pay over $4 billion in fines and consented to have a government-approved monitor oversee the firm’s activities. Zhao, who could face jail time, stepped down as CEO.

The shake-up leaves the six-year-old firm in the hands of Richard Teng, who was a regulator in Abu Dhabi and Singapore before joining Binance in 2021. He has said he believes the firm is in good shape and is ready to move forward.

PG&E is declaring a 1-cent per-share dividend, its first quarterly payout of the kind since 2017. The San Francisco-based electricity and natural gas company said Tuesday that it is reinstating the dividend to reflect the progress it has made in becoming a safe and stable utility that can pull in more long-term investors

“I’m very proud of the progress PG&E has made reducing operating risk and financial risk,” Chief Executive Patti Poppe said. 

The dividend is payable on Jan. 15 to shareholders of record as of Dec. 29.

The company said that moving forward, it expects to pay a common stock dividend every quarter from its net income.

—Dean Seal

Ivelisse Rodriguez Simon helped launch Avante Capital Partners in the midst of the global financial crisis in 2009, a golden time for investors in private credit.

More than a decade later, the universe of private-credit firms and the assets it manages have ballooned, but Avante remains one of only a few such firms owned by women or other managers from diverse backgrounds.

“There’s a few of us, and we still have to paddle pretty hard,” Rodriguez Simon said. “It’s very hard to compete when you’re a private-credit manager of $1 billion against a private-credit manager that has $100 billion.”

Panama’s top court ruled Tuesday against a contract between the government and Canadian miner First Quantum Minerals, placing in jeopardy one of the world’s largest copper mines.

The court unanimously ruled that a law passed in October by the National Assembly, which recently approved a revised contract between the mining company and the Panamanian government, is unconstitutional. The law provided a legal framework for the contract allowing the company to operate the large mine. The court had received about 10 challenges to the law on constitutional grounds.

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