Bankruptcy Judge A. Jay Cristol approved an agreement to pass the rights to O.J. Simpson’s book If I Did It to relatives of Ron Goldman, who was murdered along with Nicole Brown Simpson in 1994, Reuters reported yesterday. Earlier this year, a California judge ordered rights to his book put up for public bidding to benefit the Goldmans’ claims. The auction was canceled in April when Lorraine Brooke Associates, a company set up in the name of Simpson’s children to collect his reported $1 million book advance, declared bankruptcy in Miami. However, Judge Cristol ruled in June that Lorraine Brooke Associates was a shell company formed to conceal Simpson’s book earnings from the Goldmans, paving the way for them to pursue their claim. Under the settlement hammered out by lawyers earlier this month and approved by Cristol on Monday, the Goldmans obtained all rights to the book, and to Simpson’s name and likeness in connection with it.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) accused collapsed hedge fund Amaranth Advisors LLC and two former traders of manipulating the U.S. natural gas market early last year, the Wall Street Journal reported today. The allegations come a day after the Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed similar accusations against the fallen fund and its top trader, Brian Hunter and announced action against other firms. FERC said that Amaranth’s manipulation was accomplished through trades made on Nymex Holdings Inc.’s New York Mercantile Exchange in February, March and April 2006. The Amaranth case is one of the first times that FERC has used its new enforcement authority under the Energy Policy Act of 2005 to prosecute market manipulation.

Nearly a month after the newly formed board of Delta Air Lines Inc. was expected to name a successor to Chief Executive Gerald Grinstein, directors at the Atlanta airline remain undecided about who will run the company, theWall Street Journal reported today. Grinstein and other Delta executives attribute the longer-than-expected deliberations to the complicated logistics of repeatedly gathering the new board members and educating them about the company and the industry. Most directors, selected by a committee of Delta’s largest creditors during its time in bankruptcy court protection, have no previous airline experience. The slow pace of the process is raising questions among Delta employees and analysts about whether the board is looking outside the company for a new candidate — passing over two internal contenders backed by Grinstein.

Australia’s personal bankruptcy regulator said that a record number of offenders have been prosecuted under the Bankruptcy Act in the past financial year, the Australian Broadcasting Corp. reported today. The Insolvency and Trustee Service (ITSA) says its more targeted approach has seen a 33 percent increase in prosecutions Australia-wide. The national manager of the service’s fraud investigation unit, Jeff Hanley, says courts are becoming tougher on bankruptcy fraud. “The number of prosecutions themselves are up primarily because ITSA has streamlined its investigations portfolio, to the extent where we sort of look at problematic areas now, whether it be geographical or in types of offences,” he said.

Quovadx Inc., a Greenwood Village, Co. software company, entered into an agreement to be acquired by Rogue Wave for $139 million. The purchase by Rogue Wave, a unit of private-equity concern Battery Ventures, follows six rough years for Quovadx as a public company. Recently, the Securities and Exchange Commission sued two former Quovadx executives related to accounting problems three years ago. Quovadx earlier settled a number of investor lawsuits related to the accounting matter for more than $18 million.

Blockbuster Inc. is hoping that its new CEO, James Keyes, can bring some of his magic to the Dallas, Tx.-based chain of video-rental stores.  Mr. Keyes had great success at the helm of the 7-Eleven convenience-store chain, leading it from bankruptcy to thirty-six consecutive quarters of increased sales.  He now faces the daunting task of reversing the dismal results at Blockbuster, which has lost money in nine of its last ten years, partly due to competition from Netflix Inc., the Los Gatos, Ca. online DVD-rental concern.  Mr. Keyes hasn’t detailed his strategy for Blockbuster yet, but he does hope to reduce the size of an average Blockbuster store and customize titles according to local demand, just as he localized product offerings at 7-Eleven locations. But besides battling rival Netflix, Blockbuster must compete with video-on-demand services that are eating into the movie-rental market.  It’s thought that Blockbuster, which has shuttered hundreds of stores, will continue trimming down by closing another 240 locations this year.  In its first quarter, Blockbuster lost $46.6 million, compared to a $1.9 million loss in the year-earlier first quarter.

Wall Street banks that are arranging financing for Cerberus Capital Management LP’s acquisition of the Chrysler Group are looking to sweeten the terms on loans as uncertainty in the debt market lingers, the Wall Street Journal reported today. Bankers marketed a $10 billion loan for Chrysler’s auto business yesterday at 3.75 percentage points above the London Interbank Offered Rate, compared to the 3.25 percentage points discussed when the road show kicked off about three weeks ago, Standard & Poor’s said. Another $2 billion in financing for the auto company is also being marketed at seven percentage points above the London Interbank offered rate, compared to the original six percentage points. The banks are also offering to sell those loans at less than 100 cents on the dollar in a bid to further entice investors to the deal. The sweetened terms reflect a recent weakening in the market for risky corporate loans, which has raised questions about the ability of buyout firms to continue to tap the credit needed to finance big deals.

Unsecured creditors of ASC Inc. say the automobile-sunroof maker has abdicated its fiduciary duties and they’re asking a judge to convert the company’s chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization into a chapter 7, the Associated Press reported yesterday.Southgate, Mich.-based ASC’s pursuit of “wholly unnecessary” funding from its noteholder and parent company, American Specialty Car Holdings LLC, illustrates that the case is being run for the benefit of Holdings, ASC’s unsecured creditors’ committee said Tuesday in a court filing. Conversion of the case is required, the committee said, given Holdings’ actions and ASC’s abdication of its fiduciary duties by agreeing to the financing arrangement. A hearing on ASC’s bid for $3 million in new bankruptcy funding from American Specialty Car Holdings was set for last Thursday in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Detroit. At the last minute, however, ASC asked the court to adjourn the hearing for two weeks. The court complied, pushing the session back to July 18. At the same time, the court will take up the committee’s request to convert the case to a chapter 7 liquidation.

House and Senate committees will be holding hearings today focused on the hedge fund and private equity industries. The Senate Finance Committee will hold a hearing on the issue of “carried interest” by hedge fund managers, interest that is a percentage of the fund’s earnings (usually 15 to 25 percent, once specified benchmarks are met) and is treated as capital gains under current tax rules. The hearing will focus on whether this income should be taxed as regular personal income. The House Financial Services Committee will also be holding a hearing titled “Hedge Funds and Systemic Risk: Perspectives of The President’s Working Group on Financial Markets.”

A Manhattan federal judge has rejected Parmalat SpA’s request to dismiss an investor class-action lawsuit stemming from the Italian dairy company’s December 2003 collapse in an accounting scandal, Reuters reported yesterday. The ruling is a defeat for Chief Executive Enrico Bondi, who is trying to distance the reorganized Parmalat from prior management, and is seeking billions of dollars of damages from the company’s former bankers. In a June 28 ruling, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan said the reorganized Parmalat “expressly agreed” when it emerged from Europe’s largest bankruptcy in 2005 to assume the old Parmalat’s liabilities for fraud that the investors alleged. Kaplan also rejected Bondi’s contention that the investors waited too long after learning of the alleged fraud to file claims against the reorganized Parmalat. He said that procedural developments in the case pushed back their filing deadline.