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For three decades, Wayne LaPierre has been the implacable face of the gun lobby, a scourge of the left who argued that giving ground on gun control was akin to giving up on America. So it was remarkable to see the shambolic turn his tenure atop the National Rifle Association has taken showcased last week in federal bankruptcy court in Dallas, the New York Times reported. LaPierre acknowledged that he had secretly taken the N.R.A. into bankruptcy — without telling even his top lieutenants or most of his board — essentially as an end run around attacks from the New York attorney general, who is seeking to shut down the group amid charges of financial mismanagement and corruption. And he made a string of admissions that served largely to underscore the N.R.A.’s disarray and the questions about his own fitness to lead it. He didn’t know, he testified, that his former chief financial officer had received a $360,000-a-year consulting contract after leaving under a cloud. He didn’t know that the personal travel agent the N.R.A. had hired to book charter flights for him and his family — the Bahamas was a favorite destination — was charging a 10 percent booking fee on top of a retainer that could reach $26,000 a month. He didn’t know that one of his former top lieutenants had arranged for his wife to be hired by an N.R.A. contractor, or that her compensation had been billed back to the N.R.A. Weakened by internal strife, and after an attenuated presence in the 2020 presidential election, the N.R.A. these days often seems more fixated on litigation than guns. Among other things, it has spent nearly $8 million in legal fees to do battle with its former top lobbyist, Chris Cox, the attorney general’s office claimed, even though Mr. Cox is seeking a little over a quarter of that amount in a severance dispute. (A lawyer for the N.R.A.’s main outside firm called the figures “misleading” but did not provide a breakdown.) But perhaps the N.R.A.’s greatest power remains the perception of its power.

A travel consultant who testified in the National Rifle Association’s bankruptcy case said Chief Executive Wayne LaPierre instructed her to omit certain flight stops from invoices she sent to the gun-rights group for Mr. LaPierre’s private-jet travel, a disclosure NRA attorneys are challenging to keep out of the court record, the Wall Street Journal reported. The travel consultant testified, in a videotape deposition played in bankruptcy court Thursday, that certain invoices she sent the NRA omitted stops in Nebraska and the Bahamas, at Mr. LaPierre’s request. Some of Mr. LaPierre’s relatives who were frequent travelers on NRA-paid private jets live in Nebraska. The NRA chief previously testified he frequently traveled to the Bahamas to stay for free on a 108-foot yacht in the Bahamas with family members, provided by an NRA vendor, for security reasons. The testimony that alleged Mr. LaPierre sought to hide certain private-jet stops from the NRA’s own accountants could be evidence he knew what he was doing was wrong and was deliberately concealing it, legal specialists said. “If true, this seems like a clear documented instance of knowing misuse of NRA assets and concealing that abuse,” said Elizabeth Kingsley, a Washington nonprofit-law attorney. The testimony came on the fourth day of high-stakes hearings in the NRA’s chapter 11 bankruptcy case in Dallas. The gun-rights group filed for bankruptcy protection in January, in part to counter fraud and expense-abuse allegations by New York General Letitia James, who is seeking to have the NRA dissolved. Read more. (Subscription required.) 

In related news, Wayne LaPierre told a federal bankruptcy judge that he violated the powerful gun-rights group’s policies by failing to disclose free overseas yacht trips and other potential conflicts of interest, Bloomberg News. Under questioning from a lawyer for New York’s Attorney General, LaPierre defended the use of the yacht, calling the trips a “security retreat.” Family members joined him occasionally on the yacht, which is owned by the principal shareholder of a company that was paid by the organization to raise money, handle public relations and produce television shows, LaPierre acknowledged in his testimony in federal court Wednesday. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Harlin D. “Cooter” Hale will take LaPierre’s testimony into consideration when deciding whether to appoint a trustee to run the NRA while it’s in bankruptcy, or throw the case out, as the New York Attorney General has requested. The NRA boss said that the yacht excursions were among several items of value that he failed to disclose from 2013 and 2020, including a hunting trip in Botswana. “It should have been disclosed,” LaPierre told Judge Hale during a court fight that could reshape one of the most politically powerful organizations in the U.S. LaPierre said he didn’t pay for the hunting trip, but described it as part of the gun-rights organization’s image-building efforts. He filed a disclosure form for the first time in the past few days listing items of value he’d received from people with, or who may be seeking, ties to the NRA. Read more.

A New York judge refused to issue an injunction protecting a West Texas wind farm against the alleged risk of a takeover by Citigroup Inc. over a $113 million bill stemming from the winter storm that swept the state in February, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Justice Robert R. Reed of the Supreme Court of New York ruled against Stephens Ranch Wind Energy LLC, which had sought to prohibit Citi from taking action against the wind farm based on its alleged default under a power-purchasing contract with the bank. The ruling highlights the challenges facing the vast Texas wind industry after the historic winter storm and resulting electricity crisis. Power prices soared, leaving many wind farms deep underwater on deals with banks and hitting power retailers, municipal utilities and other market participants with huge bills too. Many wind farms in Texas, to get construction financing, enter into long-term hedged contracts with financial institutions in which the operator agrees to provide a steady stream of electricity to the counterparty. Citi said it had to buy electricity itself, at vastly elevated prices, when Stephens Ranch failed to deliver and sent the wind farm an invoice for $113 million. Stephens Ranch sued, saying it couldn’t be held responsible for the unexpected storm and the resulting spike in energy prices.

Stoneway Capital Ltd., the owner of four power plants in Argentina, filed for bankruptcy in New York on Wednesday after an Argentine Supreme Court ruling against the company prolonged the closure of one of its generation facilities, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. Stoneway missed an interest payment on March 1, 2020, and soon after entered forbearance agreements with its creditors, according to a declaration filed in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in New York by David Mack, Stoneway’s sole director. The company has struggled to meet its debt obligations and working capital needs and negotiated a debt restructuring to convert $271 million in loans to equity, according to a declaration by Mr. Mack. The proposal, however, fell through after an Argentine court ordered the company to shut down operations at its Matheu facility in March. The ruling followed a higher-court decision in December in favor of an environmental group that had been fighting the construction and operation of the plant since 2017, Mr. Mack said.

Wayne LaPierre, the embattled chief executive of the National Rifle Association, said yesterday that he had kept his organization’s recent bankruptcy filing secret from almost all its senior officials, including its general counsel, chief financial officer and top lobbyist. He also did not inform most of the N.R.A.’s board, the New York Times reported. LaPierre made the comments after taking the stand, virtually, at a trial in federal bankruptcy court in Dallas. Though the N.R.A. is solvent, it filed for bankruptcy protection in January in an audacious bid to circumvent regulators in New York, where the N.R.A. has been chartered for a century and a half. The state’s attorney general, Letitia James, had sued the association in August, trying to shut it down amid claims of mismanagement and corruption. She is also seeking tens of millions of dollars in misspent funds from LaPierre and three other current or former N.R.A. leaders. The nonprofit organization has been enmeshed in scandal for the last two years, with revelations of lavish spending by the N.R.A. and its contractors — on Zegna suits and luxurious trips Mr. LaPierre took to places like Lake Como in Italy and the Atlantis Resort in the Bahamas. Other benefits included chartered jets for him and his family and vacations on a contractor’s yachts, which were named Illusions and Grand Illusion.

CVS Health Corp., Walgreens Boots Alliance and other pharmacy chains face mounting pressure to settle thousands of government lawsuits over their role in the U.S. opioid epidemic, after a federal judge warned the companies they risk financial peril, Bloomberg News reported. As drug makers and distributors work to resolve similar complaints, mediation has failed with pharmacies, which are accused of ignoring red flags about suspicious painkiller prescriptions. The first trials are set to start this year, and a judge on Wednesday may expand the number of early cases going before juries to help gauge the potential cost of settling all the cases. If pharmacy owners, including Walmart Inc. and Rite Aid Corp., “want to hemorrhage money trying cases all over the country, they have a legal right to do it until they drop, go bankrupt or win them all,” U.S. District Judge Dan Polster, who is overseeing all the opioid cases, said at a hearing March 10. “No other defendant is operating that way.” Judge Polster’s admonishment comes as the rest of the opioid industry seeks to resolve claims filed by local and state governments, including a $26 billion accord by Johnson & Johnson, AmerisourceBergen Corp., Cardinal Health Inc. and McKesson Corp. Purdue Pharma LP proposed a $10 billion settlement as part of its bankruptcy. McKinsey & Co., which advised the industry on ways to boost opioid sales, reached a $641.5 million deal with states last month.

The official committee representing child sex abuse victims in the Boy Scouts of America bankruptcy is asking a judge for permission to file its own reorganization plan, saying the plan proposed by the BSA falls woefully short of fairly compensating abuse victims while shielding local Boy Scouts councils and sponsoring organizations from liability, the Associated Press reported. The official tort claimants committee filed a motion late last week objecting to the BSA’s request for the court to extend the period in which the Boy Scouts have exclusive rights to file and solicit votes on a reorganization plan. The BSA’s plan proposes a $300 million contribution by local councils to a fund for victims, about $115 million in cash and noninsurance assets from the BSA, and the assignment of BSA and local council insurance policies. In return, the 253 local councils and thousands of sponsoring organizations would be released from further liability. The committee noted in its court filing that it had made a settlement offer to the Boy Scouts estimating the value of the roughly 84,000 sexual abuse claims filed in the bankruptcy at about $103 billion, adding that those estimates were “extremely conservative.” The committee noted that its estimate counts each claim as a single act of abuse, even though a substantial number of victims were abused repeatedly and in different ways over several years. The committee also noted that its average claim value of $811,215 is less than the average of $1.2 million per claim that the University of Southern California agreed to pay last month in an $852 million settlement with more than 700 women who accused the college’s longtime campus gynecologist of sexual abuse.

Airplane-parts maker Tect Aerospace Group Holdings Inc. has filed for bankruptcy ahead of a planned asset sale, hurt by Boeing Co. ’s halt on production of the 737 MAX jetliner and by travel reductions during the coronavirus pandemic, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. The Wichita, Kan.-based manufacturer has arranged a $60.2 million financing package from Boeing to maintain operations during the chapter 11 case, filed Monday in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Del. Boeing has the option to use its debt as currency to buy the business, according to court papers. Tect parts are used in flight controls, fuselage and other sections of both civilian and military aircraft world-wide. The company said it has 381 full-time employees at its headquarters, at a manufacturing plant in Everett, Wash., and at facilities in Wellington, Kan., and Park City, Kan. The pandemic, coupled with last year’s halt in 737 MAX production, caused purchase cutbacks and production stoppages in the aircraft industry, severely impacting Tect, Chief Restructuring Officer Shaun Martin said in a sworn declaration.

Law firm White & Case LLP will stay in charge of a $14 billion bankruptcy lawsuit against Argentina’s YPF SA, a judge said, rejecting complaints that a lawyer’s career move had undermined the state oil giant’s defense, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. The ruling said that YPF failed to show why White & Case should be ousted as counsel to the bankruptcy trust that has sued YPF in the litigation, which seeks to hold the Argentine oil company responsible for the costs of cleaning up New Jersey’s contaminated Passaic River. Judge Christopher Sontchi of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Del., issued the ruling Tuesday. Judge Sontchi said that White & Case had erected sufficient safeguards after hiring Jessica Lauria, a former top legal strategist to YPF, in October 2020. Ethical and law firm procedures will protect against disclosure of information that could be used against YPF, he found. Even though Ms. Lauria is no longer involved in the Passaic River litigation, YPF feared inadvertent disclosures of its confidential information.

KKR & Co. agreed to pay $3.37 billion for a 20% stake in a Sempra Energy unit comprising the U.S. company’s infrastructure assets, including a liquefied natural gas project and a Mexican renewables and pipelines operator, Bloomberg News reported. It’s the latest example of a broader push among U.S. utilities eschewing diversification to focus on providing electricity and gas to homes and businesses. The deal values Sempra Infrastructure Partners at about $25.2 billion, including expected asset-related debt, Sempra said Monday in a statement. Selling the stake also sets a market value for Sempra’s infrastructure unit, said Pavel Molchanov, an analyst at Raymond James. “That means that Sempra’s banks, its lenders, can look at this and perhaps improve how they think about the company’s balance sheet.” The move comes four months after Sempra announced the creation of the new unit to simplify its structure and aid development of gas and renewables projects. The company, which recently announced a $32 billion capital-spending plan focused on its Texas and California utilities, plans to use the proceeds to fund growth of its U.S. utilities and strengthen its balance sheet.