Third-Party Releases in Mahwah Bergen’s Chapter 11 Plan Held to Be Unenforceable

Mayer Brown partners Tyler R. Ferguson, Aaron Gavant, and Sean T. Scott and associate Samuel R. Rabuck recently published an article for Mayer Brown’s Perspectives & Events portal on the January 13, 2022, decision in which Judge David Novak of the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia vacated the bankruptcy court’s order confirming the Chapter 11 plan of the Mahwah Bergen Retail Group (formerly known as Ascena Retail Group), holding that the plan’s non-consensual third-party releases were unenforceable. The ruling arrived shortly after an opinion issued by the US District Court for the Southern District of New York in the Purdue Pharma bankruptcy case, in which the district court there held that the Bankruptcy Code does not authorize non-consensual third-party releases outside of the asbestos context.

The full article is available here.