BANKING/ FINANCE

It’s Official:

Lincoln’s onetime parent company received official clearance this week to liquidate itself under a bankruptcy plan approved last fall by a federal judge.

American Continental Corp. in Phoenix has about $340 million in debts and only $6 million in assets, providing creditors with less than 2 cents on the dollar.

Small investors who bought about $200 million in corporate bonds at Lincoln’s 29 Southern California branches will not get a penny. But they will share in about $14.6 million that federal regulators are providing them in return for legal rights to sue Keating, his associates and his advisers in further litigation.

The bondholders have already filed more than a dozen lawsuits charging Keating and others with fraud and racketeering in the sale of the bonds.

U.S. District Judge Richard M. Bilby, who approved the company’s liquidation plan, has appointed former federal judge J. Lawrence Irving in San Diego to hold settlement talks between bondholder attorneys and attorneys for 63 individual and 33 company defendants.