Optimum Lawsuit Against Apollo: Antitrust and Kirkland Claims

Optimum Communications, the broadband company formerly known as Altice USA, filed an antitrust lawsuit against Apollo Global Management and seven other major creditors on November 25, 2025, accusing them of forming an illegal cartel that has locked the company out of the debt markets. The case, Optimum Communications, Inc. v. Apollo Capital Management, L.P., et al. (Case No. 1:25-cv-09785), is pending in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York before Judge Jeannette A. Vargas.¹

What Optimum Is Claiming

The complaint brings claims under Section 1 of the Sherman Act and Section 4 of the Clayton Act against eight named defendants plus up to 1,000 unnamed “Doe Entities.” The named defendants, all members of a creditor steering committee, are Apollo Capital Management, Ares Management, BlackRock Financial Management, GoldenTree Asset Management, J.P. Morgan Investment Management, Loomis Sayles & Company, Oaktree Capital Management, and PGIM, Inc. Optimum’s subsidiary CSC Holdings is a co-plaintiff.¹²

Optimum alleges four kinds of anticompetitive conduct:

A group boycott, in which the lenders refused to deal with Optimum unless it accepted terms dictated by the group.
Price fixing, by funneling all negotiations through a steering committee that set terms across the entire lender group.
Market restraint, through a two-thirds supermajority consent requirement binding creditors across all classes of Optimum’s debt and preventing open-market repurchases or individual negotiations.
Coercion, through demands that Optimum surrender flexibility provisions in its loan documents, such as the ability to conduct dropdown transactions, as a condition of any deal.

The core factual allegation is one of market power. Optimum claims the defendant group controls 88% of the U.S. leveraged-finance market and holds roughly 99% of CSC Holdings’ funded debt, which the company says has “decimated the pool of potential lenders” and forced it to pay inflated interest rates.³

The complaint also targets fees the creditor group’s advisors demanded Optimum pay. According to the filing, the group required Optimum to pay investment bank PJT Partners $200,000 per month, a $15 million transaction fee, and a $5 million discretionary fee, with Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld serving as the group’s law firm at Optimum’s expense. Optimum seeks treble damages, attorneys’ fees, and a judicial declaration that the cooperation agreement is unlawful and void.³⁴

The Cooperation Agreement at the Center of the Case

The alleged cartel is a creditor cooperation agreement signed on July 3, 2024. Under it, a group of Optimum’s lenders committed to negotiate collectively rather than individually with the company. The agreement had an initial 18-month term running through January 3, 2026, with an option to extend for another 18 months.³

Cooperation agreements have become a common defensive tool in leveraged finance. When a distressed borrower attempts a “liability management exercise,” it may cut deals with some lenders at the expense of others, often by moving valuable assets to subsidiaries beyond creditors’ reach or by offering favorable terms to a subset of lenders willing to amend loan documents. The maneuvers have been called “creditor-on-creditor violence” because holdouts can end up with dramatically worse recoveries. In the Serta Simmons Bedding bankruptcy, participating lenders were set to recover nearly 80% of their claims while non-participants recovered just 1.5%. Cooperation agreements aim to prevent that outcome by requiring supermajority consent before any member can transact with the borrower.⁵

That is the practice Optimum is trying to have declared illegal.

Why Optimum Is In This Position

The suit did not appear in a vacuum. Optimum is carrying approximately $26 billion in debt accumulated under the acquisition-driven strategy of its controlling shareholder, Patrick Drahi.⁶ Approximately $6.2 billion held by CSC Holdings matures in 2027, with about $4.1 billion coming due in April of that year.⁷ In June 2026, S&P Global Ratings cut Optimum’s issuer credit rating to CCC with a negative outlook, calling its capital structure “unsustainable” and projecting that a restructuring rather than a refinancing appears increasingly likely.⁸

Optimum has said it is seeking a consensual resolution with the creditor group. A non-consensual restructuring, the company says, could trigger a federal tax liability exceeding $4 billion.

The Kirkland & Ellis Allegations

The case escalated in early 2026 when Optimum amended its complaint to add a tortious interference claim. The new allegations centered on Kirkland & Ellis, which Optimum had retained in August 2025 as transaction counsel to negotiate with creditors. Kirkland was not representing Optimum in the antitrust suit itself.⁹

According to the amended complaint, filed around February 27, 2026, the creditor group was “incensed” by the antitrust lawsuit and retaliated by pressuring Kirkland to drop Optimum as a client. Many of the defendant firms were longstanding Kirkland clients, and the complaint alleged they leveraged “hundreds of millions of dollars in existing or potential business for Kirkland” to force the firm’s withdrawal. Kirkland resigned from the engagement at the end of January 2026 and said publicly in November 2025 that “Kirkland does not sue clients and did not here.”⁹¹⁰

Optimum also alleged that after Kirkland’s departure the defendants applied “similar pressure on at least two other law firms” to prevent them from taking over the engagement. White & Case ultimately replaced Kirkland as Optimum’s legal advisor.¹¹ Apollo, BlackRock, and Ares formally denied the allegations regarding Kirkland.¹²

How the Defendants and the Industry Are Responding

The defendants moved to dismiss the amended complaint. Under a briefing schedule set by Judge Vargas, the motion to dismiss was due by February 6, 2026, Optimum’s opposition by March 27, and the defendants’ reply by April 17. A pretrial conference was scheduled for February 19, 2026.¹³

The case has drawn unusually broad industry pushback. On March 25, 2026, five major financial trade groups filed a joint amicus brief supporting dismissal: the Loan Syndications and Trading Association, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, the Managed Funds Association, the Investment Company Institute, and the Creditor Rights Coalition.¹⁴

The trade groups argued the Sherman Act does not apply to creditors banding together to collect on existing debts. They called cooperation agreements a “defensive shield” against coercive liability management exercises and a standard market practice, and warned that condemning them would raise interest rates, make bankruptcies more expensive, and chill legitimate creditor coordination. The brief leaned on United Airlines, Inc. v. U.S. Bank N.A., a Seventh Circuit decision holding that joint creditor activity to collect amounts due under competitively determined contracts is not the type of activity governed by antitrust law, and on the Second Circuit’s 1982 decision in Sharon Steel Corp. v. Chase Manhattan Bank, which recognized that collective creditor action commonly serves the interests of all parties, including the debtor.⁵

Where the Case Stands

As of mid-2026, the defendants’ motion to dismiss remains pending before Judge Vargas. The case has not reached the discovery stage.⁸

Optimum has not waited for a ruling. In November 2025, it transferred its “Optimum East” cable operations and other valuable assets into unrestricted subsidiaries beyond the reach of CSC Holdings’ creditors and secured $2 billion in new incremental term loans through a subsidiary.¹⁵¹⁶ The new financing includes “anti-cooperation” provisions that would cancel the debt of any lender found to be participating in a cooperation agreement, aimed directly at the defendants’ arrangement.¹⁷ By June 2026, the company had created a new unrestricted holding company, CSC Investments II LLC (“Unsub Topco”), and placed its Optimum East Cable business and a 50.01% stake in Lightpath within it, stating the goal was to “insulate the Company’s unrestricted assets from the potential adverse impact of CSC Holdings being unable to reach agreement with the holders of its funded debt.”¹⁸

What This Case Could Change

This is the first major test of whether antitrust law can be used to attack creditor cooperation agreements. Legal analysts have described Optimum’s theory as “novel” and “misplaced,” and some view the lawsuit primarily as a litigation tactic to gain leverage in restructuring negotiations rather than a case likely to produce a binding antitrust precedent.⁴

The stakes for leveraged finance are still real. The number of coercive liability management exercises jumped from 8 in 2022 to 49 in 2024, and cooperation agreements have proliferated in response.⁵ A ruling that a group holding 99% of a borrower’s debt can be treated as an antitrust conspiracy would reshape how distressed borrowers and lenders negotiate. A ruling that it cannot would harden the practice as settled market infrastructure. The motion to dismiss is where that first line gets drawn.

1
CourtListener. Optimum Communications Inc. v. Apollo Capital Management LP
2
PACER Monitor. Joint Case Management Letter
3
ION Analytics / Debtwire. Optimum Communications Claims Its Creditors Control Leveraged Finance Market in Antitrust Attack on Cooperation Agreement
4
Cleary Gottlieb. Cooperation, Not a Cartel: Why Lender Co-Op Agreements Should Generally Withstand Antitrust Scrutiny
5
Managed Funds Association. Amicus Brief in Support of Defendants’ Motion to Dismiss
6
Bloomberg. Altice USA to Repay $1.9 Billion Leveraged Loan Two Years Early
7
Optimum Investor Relations. Optimum Launches Effort to Drive a Consensual Repositioning
8
S&P Global Ratings. Optimum Communications Inc. Rating Lowered
9
Octus. Optimum Amended Co-Op Antitrust Complaint Adds Tortious Interference Claim
10
Transacted. Kirkland & Ellis Resigns Optimum Mandate Amid Creditor Antitrust Suit Pressure
11
9fin. Optimum Kirkland Antitrust
12
Law360. Apollo, BlackRock Deny Asking Kirkland to Abandon Optimum
13
9fin. Optimum Co-Op Antitrust Litigation
14
SIFMA. Optimum Communications v. Apollo Et Al.
15
Broadband Breakfast. Optimum Raises $500 Million as Debt Wall Looms
16
Investing.com. Optimum Communications Secures $2 Billion in New Term Loans, Refinances Debt
17
Creditor Rights Coalition. Weekly News, December 5
18
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Optimum Communications Form 8-K