U.S. investment bank Lehman Brothers said that it had filed a lawsuit today to reclaim $352 million from Japanese trading house Marubeni Corp in the wake of a finance scam, Reuters reported. The loans in question were made last year to finance a revamp of hospitals and lease medical equipment via Asclepius, a now-bankrupt unit of drug firm LTT Bio-Pharma Co., and arranged through Marubeni staff. When repayment fell due on Feb. 29, the U.S. investment bank was told by Marubeni that its contract was void because it had been signed with a forged seal. Seals are used for business and legal transactions in Japan. Lehman Brothers also believed that one of the people it had discussed the loans with had been an imposter.

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Southern Building Products Inc., Florida’s largest maker of roof and floor trusses, has filed for chapter 11, the latest victim of a slowdown in the U.S. housing market, the Associated Press reported yesterday. The company said that its sales revenue fell from a high of $33 million in 2005 to $11.6 million in 2007. When lender Bank Atlantic froze its line of credit, Southern Building said that a chapter 11 reorganization became its “only alternative to maximize return to all creditors.” Bank Atlantic is owed more than $5.8 million, according to court papers.

U.S. District Judge Lawrence McKenna denied a second plea by Deloitte & Touche LLP to be dropped as a co-defendant from the multidistrict securities litigation against Adelphia Communications Corp., leaving hedge funds’ fraud claims as actionable against the firm over its auditing of the collapsed cable company’s financial reports, Bankruptcy Law360 reported yesterday. The funds, among them Appaloosa Investment Ltd Partnership, claim that they bought debt securities issued by Adelphia at inflated prices, relying on materially false announcements and regulatory filings prepared by Deloitte. Judge McKenna agreed in September to dismiss some of the plaintiffs’ claims on the grounds that they had been “reckless” in their decision to buy shares in the company and could not justifiably claim to have relied on Adelphia’s alleged fraudulent statements about its financial health when investing their money. However, the judge declined to toss other securities claims that required only that the plaintiffs were unaware of the alleged falsity of the statements.