As fraud against seniors rose nearly 40 percent last year, according to the North American Securities Administrators Assn., Congress recently introduced legislation that aims to curtail bogus credentials used to snare elderly clients, the Los Angeles Times reported yesterday. The Senior Investor Protection bill would provide funding for states to monitor the credentials of people claiming to be senior or retirement specialists and provide funds to investigate and prosecute advisors who use fraudulent or misleading professional designations to get clients. The bill looks to bar advisors from using credentials that have not been verified by an accredited institution, such as a college or university, or by a nationally recognized accrediting institution.

Bankruptcy Judge Judith K. Fitzgerald has given W.R. Grace & Co. approval to sell off 10 polluted industrial sites in a deal that the company has estimated will help it eliminate more than $12.5 million in environmental liabilities, Bankruptcy Law360 reported yesterday. Under the agreement, Environmental Liability Transfer Inc., an environmental acquisition development company, will be required to deposit $11 million into an environmental trust responsible for distributing funds to reimburse expenditures or cleanup costs for the properties. The amount will include a $2.5 million upfront payment, plus a percentage of the subsequent sale proceeds. Grace will receive $4.4 million from the sale of all but the Charleston, S.C., property, which is treated differently under the agreement. Judge Fitzgerald wrote that the sale agreement did not relieve Grace of its duties to comply with a cleanup settlement agreement the company reached in December with the U.S. government, or with any other settlement or judgment in the various states where the contaminated properties are located.

Delta Air Lines and Northwest Airlines agreed late Monday to merge, in a $3.1 billion deal that would create the world’s biggest airline and could prompt other airlines to pursue mergers of their own, the New York Times reported today. Another leading merger candidate is a combination of United Airlines and Continental Airlines, which have explored the idea. The airlines now may try to get the deal wrapped up within the next 30 days. The Delta-Northwest agreement came despite failed efforts to get pilots at both airlines to agree on how to combine their own ranks, an issue that could lead to labor unrest and disruptions to flight operations in the coming years. Northwest pilots immediately said that they would oppose the deal.

W.R. Grace & Co., the chemical maker forced into bankruptcy seven years ago by more than 135,000 asbestos injury claims, agreed to settle the remainder of those cases by paying as much as $1.8 billion, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. The accord, disclosed yesterday in a regulatory filing, would eliminate the last major hurdle to Grace’s reorganization if it’s approved by a bankruptcy judge in Pittsburgh. Under the deal, Grace will no longer have liability for its asbestos products and all future lawsuits would be settled through a trust fund. Under the settlement, the company will pay as much as $1.8 billion into the trust for victims of its asbestos-related products, including insulation. The fund will first collect $250 million, then an additional $1.55 billion from 2019 through 2034, guaranteed by 50.1 percent of Grace common stock.

Thornburg Mortgage Inc. CEO Larry Goldstone said that he expects the company to resume making loans “within weeks, if not days,” the Wall Street Journal reported today. The Santa Fe, N.M.-based company, which has focused on making jumbo mortgage loans, had to suspend funding new mortgages recently after a sharp drop in the value of its mortgage securities triggered margin calls from its lenders and left it short of cash. In recent weeks, the situation got worse because the company wasn’t able to meet $610 million in margin calls and nearly had to file for bankruptcy.