After rallying in the 'good' news that the company has entered Chapter 11, PG&E's stock is lower today, not helped by a federal judge's comments slamming the triple-bankrupt utility for serially starting fires.

Following a series of massive fires along its 125,000 miles of power lines over the last two years, Bloomberg reports that U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup  - who is overseeing PG&E’s probation for safety violations that led to felony convictions for the 2010 explosion of one of its gas pipelines, which killed eight people - didn’t back down from his criticism of the utility despite being told he had overreached.

“Usually a criminal on probation is forthcoming and admits what they need to admit. You haven’t admitted much,” Alsup told lawyers for the company at a hearing Wednesday in federal court in San Francisco.

“There’s a clear-cut pattern here: that PG&E is starting these fires.”

Among other suggestions, the judge proposed subjecting the company to criminal sanctions if it failed to shut off electric supply to portions of the grid on extremely windy days, trim tree branches and inspect and repair thousands of miles of power lines.

But of course, what are a few tens of billions of dollars of liabilities? BTFD!!

We remember the old days where corporate bankruptcy was a negative event for shareholders.

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Perhaps the only people less worthy of receiving a bonus of any kind than the Moody's and S&P analysts who as recently as three weeks ago rated now bankrupt PG&E as investment grade is the management of PG&E, which one year after the most destructive fire in California history sparked, literally, another "most destructive fire in history" with no hedges or fallbacks in place. And yet as part of its first day bankruptcy motion, the California utility that filed for bankruptcy early on Tuesday is seeking to pay employees about $130 million in performance bonuses for last year, an amount which is due to be paid in March 2019.

The largest utility in the United States, Pacific Gas & Electric Corp (PG&E), filed for bankruptcy on Tuesday as it faces billions of dollars in potential damages from wildfires in California. The utility filed documents in a US court seeking Chapter 11 reorganisation despite state investigators determining last week that its equipment was not to blame for a 2017 fire that killed 22 people in Northern California wine country.

In what's expected to be one of the most complicated bankruptcies in recent memory thanks to the involvement of indignant state and federal regulators, activist shareholders, worried bond holders and angry fire victims, PG&E has officially filed for bankruptcy.

With the second bankruptcy of PG&E looming and shareholders and bondholders both staring at massive losses...