Welcome to WSJ Pro Bankruptcy's Daily Briefing. It's Tuesday, Aug. 5. In today's briefing, the residential solar industry, facing potential financial distress due to the end of federal tax credits, is working to lower prices by cutting high sales and marketing costs. Creditors of GWG look to remove liquidating trustee Elizabeth Freeman after learning about her undisclosed romantic relationship with former judge David R. Jones. And a Houston bankruptcy judge will decide whether Linqto’s chapter 11 case should stay in Texas or be moved to Delaware.

With President Trump’s tax law putting an early end to solar tax credits, the residential solar industry is now looking to lower prices, particularly by cutting sky-high sales and marketing costs, according to companies and analysts.

“The industry must drive down customer-acquisition and selling costs to remain competitive in a maturing market,” Enphase Chief Executive Badrinarayanan Kothandaraman said on an earnings call in July. The solar manufacturer said it would double down on SolarLead Factory, a lead-generation business it bought in 2022, and Solargraf, a design platform used in solar sales it bought in 2021, to streamline customer acquisition costs.

• Related: Dealers are facing payment challenges beyond Sunnova, with some also waiting to be paid by SunPower and Lumio, both of which filed for bankruptcy in 2024 amid a downturn in the renewables industry.

Creditors of bankrupt financial company GWG Holdings sought to remove its liquidating trustee because of her romantic relationship with the judge who served as a mediator in its chapter 11 case.

A handful of investors who bought bonds issued by GWG said in court papers Monday that liquidating trustee Elizabeth Freeman should be removed for cause based on her previously undisclosed relationship with ex-judge David R. Jones, who served as the mediator in GWG's bankruptcy case.

Freeman appeared in dozens of major cases in the Houston bankruptcy court in which Jones served as the presiding judge or the mediator without any disclosure that they were involved. In 2023, Jones signed an agreement for GWG to hire Freeman as its wind-down trustee at $700 an hour. Later that year, he resigned from the bench after the couple's relationship became public.

"There is simply no excuse for her remaining in and profiting from the position that she obtained through her deception," the creditors said in their court filing. "And every day that passes with her remaining in the position of wind-down trustee is a blight on the United States bankruptcy system."

Freeman has said in separate litigation that she had no legal duty to disclose her relationship with Jones. A lawyer for Freeman declined to comment Monday.

—Andrew Scurria

The judge presiding over Linqto's bankruptcy case will decide if the investing platform filed for chapter 11 in the right court.

Judge Alfredo Perez of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Houston is scheduled on Tuesday to hear a Linqto shareholder's request to transfer the chapter 11 case to Delaware. Linqto said in filings on Monday that Houston is the better venue and that it has assets, customers and bank accounts in Texas that establish a connection to the state.

Linqto shareholder Sapien Group alleged that the company had manufactured its connection to Texas by registering a corporate entity in the state months before its bankruptcy filing. The Houston filing amounts to "venue manipulation," according to Sapien, run by former Linqto director Victor Jiang. 

Linqto had aimed to help individual investors access private-equity markets, but an internal probe turned up evidence that Linqto customers never owned the securities they thought they did, and that it had been marketing to some individuals who may not have been eligible to buy stakes in private companies in the first place.

—Andrew Scurria

Americans are back on the hunt for a good deal.

Consumer spending stagnated in the first half of this year, according to federal data issued last week, and the CEOs of Chipotle Mexican Grill, Kroger and Procter & Gamble, among others, are telling investors that their customers are more strapped—or appear to feel that way.

“There’s a lot of consumer anxiety,” said Dirk Van de Put, chief executive of Mondelez International, which makes Oreo cookies, Ritz crackers and Cadbury chocolate. Global sales of snacks rose last quarter, but U.S. sales fell a lot.

Ares Management is ramping up its sports, media and entertainment strategy. The firm just held a first close on $1.4 billion for a second fund in the strategy and related vehicles, Chief Executive Michael Arougheti said during an earnings call Friday. The capital represents more than 70% of the firm’s target for the fundraising drive.

An index of U.S. employment fell to its lowest point since October last year, as concerns rise about the resilience of the jobs market after large downward revisions to official data. The Conference Board’s Employment Trends Index, or ETI, fell to 107.55 in July from an upwardly revised 108.19 in June, the research group said Monday.

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