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Ford Motor Co., after losing an appeal to federal safety regulators this week, now must spend $610 million to replace faulty Takata airbags in 3 million cars and trucks in the U.S. and Canada, Bloomberg News reported. The company is reporting the expense as a special item in its fourth-quarter results, which won’t affect its adjusted earnings, it revealed in a regulatory filing yesterday. The recalled vehicles are from model years 2006 through 2012 and include some of Ford’s best sellers of that era, such as the Fusion sedan, Edge sport-utility vehicle and Ranger pickup. The automaker attempted to avoid the airbag recall, asserting the particular Takata inflators in its models weren’t as lethal as those that have been linked to more than a dozen deaths in the U.S. because they could propel shrapnel at drivers and passengers. Takata was purchased in April 2018 by China’s Ningbo Joyson Electronic Corp. and renamed Joyson Safety Systems. In its filing Thursday, Ford said its own study of its airbags found “the risks identified were so remote that they were inconsequential to safety.” The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration rejected Ford’s petition on Jan. 19.

The National Rifle Association said it took refuge in bankruptcy court due to partisan legal efforts in New York to put it out of business, but that it isn’t seeking to block that litigation from progressing, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. In court papers filed early Wednesday, the NRA accused New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and New York Attorney General Letitia James of targeting the organization with a lawsuit designed to weaken it in ahead of the 2020 elections. The court filing came in advance of the NRA’s debut appearance in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Dallas, where the nonprofit sought chapter 11 protection last week as part of a planned move to Texas. At the hearing, lawyers for the NRA said the organization won’t use the bankruptcy filing to try to put a halt to the New York lawsuit, which was filed in August. “As we have made clear, we’re not afraid of the litigation in New York State and we’re prepared to go forward on that,” NRA bankruptcy lawyer Patrick Neligan said during the videoconference hearing. The organization hasn’t sought to invoke the automatic stay, a bankruptcy shield that halts some hostile legal actions against troubled companies. More litigation targeting the NRA could be on the way, Mr. Neligan said. The New York attorney general’s office remains concerned about statements from the organization, said James Sheehan, chief of the charities bureau in that office. The NRA continues to defend against the lawsuit, and is due to appear in state court in Manhattan on Thursday to argue for the attorney general’s allegations to be heard in Albany, N.Y. instead.

Ford Motor Co. must recall 3 million vehicles with potentially defective driver-side Takata air bags, the U.S. auto safety regulator said yesterday, rejecting a bid by the second-largest U.S. automaker to avoid a recall, Reuters reported. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) said it was denying petitions filed by Ford and Mazda Motor Corp in 2017 seeking to avoid recalling vehicles with potentially dangerous inflators. The decision also will require Mazda to recall and repair driver air bags in approximately 5,800 vehicles. The recalls will cover various vehicles from the 2006 through 2012 model years. The defect, which leads in rare instances to air bag inflators rupturing and sending potentially deadly metal fragments flying — especially after long-term exposure to high humidity — prompted the largest automotive recall in U.S. history of more than 67 million inflators. Worldwide, about 100 million inflators installed by 19 major automakers have been recalled. The NHTSA said the “evidence makes clear that these inflators pose a significant safety risk.” Earlier this month, the auto safety agency said at least 17 million vehicles with Takata air bags remain unrepaired. Takata inflators have resulted in the deaths of at least 27 people worldwide and 18 in the United States, and over 400 reported injuries. Ford said on Tuesday that the vehicles the NHTSA was ordering be recalled were subject to an earlier Takata recall for the passenger-side airbag, but did not comment further.

Seeking an end-run around an investigation by the New York attorney general, the National Rifle Association said Friday that it was declaring bankruptcy and would reincorporate in Texas, the New York Times reported. The group’s effort to circumvent New York’s legal jurisdiction raised immediate questions from Letitia James, the New York attorney general and a Democrat, who is seeking to use her regulatory authority to dissolve the N.R.A. She has been conducting an investigation into corruption at the gun group since 2019. “The N.R.A.’s claimed financial status has finally met its moral status: bankrupt,” James said in a statement Friday. “While we review this filing, we will not allow the N.R.A. to use this or any other tactic to evade accountability and my office’s oversight.” James’s investigation has come as the N.R.A. has been racked by infighting and discontent, including the bitter departures of its president, Oliver L. North, and its top lobbyist, Chris Cox. Long the nation’s most powerful gun lobby, the N.R.A. played a diminished role in the 2020 election, hampered by financial woes and a host of legal challenges. Typically, nonprofit groups that are chartered in New York and under investigation are prohibited from relocating their assets during an inquiry; in recent years, the attorney general’s office prevented the Trump Foundation from closing before it had reached the conclusion of an investigation into that organization. The bankruptcy filing could delay the resolution of the attorney general’s case while the matter is litigated in bankruptcy court.

A bankruptcy judge won’t shorten the timeline for victims of clergy sex abuse to bring claims against the Roman Catholic diocese in Long Island, N.Y., saying survivors should get as much time as state law allows, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. The ruling by Judge Shelley Chapman of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Southern District of New York aligns a crucial deadline for claims against the Diocese of Rockville Centre with the Aug. 14 cutoff date established under New York law. The diocese, which covers nearly all of suburban Long Island, had argued for a May deadline for bankruptcy claims, saying it needed to know how many sexual abuse claims it faced in order to move ahead swiftly with a settlement plan. Judge Chapman sided with an official committee representing sexual abuse survivors, adding that pressures of the pandemic argued for more time to file claims. Hundreds of lawsuits already had been filed when the diocese, the nation’s eighth-largest by the number of baptized Catholics, sought bankruptcy protection in October 2020. In court papers, committee lawyers said “many elderly and vulnerable adults” in the New York area will be weighing whether to file a bankruptcy claim and argued they should get as much time as lawmakers had given them to sue.

Lawyers for the stars and producers of the 2012 film “Silver Linings Playbook” on Wednesday urged a federal appeals court to find the company that purchased The Weinstein Company’s assets out of bankruptcy must honor prior compensation obligations, Reuters reported. The case is one of many in which film and television talent are looking to collect on payments owed under contracts with The Weinstein Company before it filed for bankruptcy in 2018. Though stars like Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro are involved in the lawsuit, Wednesday’s arguments before the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals focused on the work-for-hire contract of “Silver Linings” producer Bruce Cohen. 

Imerys SA is pressing ahead in an effort to get out from under lawsuits over its U.S. mining operation, Imerys Talc America Inc., over the protests of health-care company Johnson & Johnson, the Wall Street Journal reported. The Imerys talc-mining business, which supplied talc for Johnson’s Baby Powder, had been hit with lawsuits claiming the product caused cancer. It was placed into chapter 11 protection in 2019 and sold in 2020 for $223 million, with the proceeds earmarked for a trust to pay cancer claims. It is now trying to win court permission to seek creditor approval of its bankruptcy repayment plan. Johnson & Johnson, which has denied liability and is fighting the lawsuits, says Imerys Talc’s bankruptcy is an improper effort to immunize the mining company’s French parent, and make it easier for cancer victims to sue Johnson & Johnson. Imerys Talc is putting sale proceeds, insurance policies and funds from settlements into a trust that will pay claims for cancer. Victims won’t get much from Imerys, court papers say. Under the Imerys Talc plan, some ovarian cancer victims can expect to collect only about 5% of the value that has been assigned to their claim, for example. Johnson & Johnson says the bankruptcy plan allowed cancer victims to set the amount of their damages without opposition, setting a precedent for collecting the rest of the money from Johnson & Johnson.

Toronto-Dominion Bank will defend itself in a trial starting in a Canadian court on Monday in which liquidators of the collapsed Antigua bank of former Texas financier Robert Allen Stanford are seeking $5.5 billion in damages, Reuters reported. The joint liquidators of Stanford International Bank (SIB) allege “negligence and knowing assistance” by TD, Canada’s second-biggest lender, in allowing SIB to maintain correspondent accounts, according to a statement filed with the Ontario Superior Court of Justice in 2019. Correspondent banking is the business of providing services to offshore financial institutions. The joint liquidators are Grant Thornton in the British Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands. The trial is scheduled to last three months, a spokesman for one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers said. Stanford is serving a 110-year prison term after being convicted in 2012 of running a $7.2 billion Ponzi scheme. TD estimated reasonably possible losses from legal and regulatory actions including the Stanford litigation of between zero and C$951 million ($750 million) as of Oct. 31. Provisions related to legal action will be taken when a loss becomes probable and an amount can be reliably estimated, it said in its 2020 annual report.

The official committee of sex-abuse victims has challenged the Boy Scouts of America over claims that Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico and other valuable assets on the organization’s balance sheet can’t be used to pay settlements to trauma survivors, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. In court papers Friday, lawyers representing those men said that the Boy Scouts are wrongly holding back $667 million in cash, investments and properties from a court-supervised bankruptcy process. The Philmont ranch is the Boy Scouts’ most prized high-adventure camp: 140,000 acres in the Rocky Mountains, the site of revenue-producing activities that have drawn more than one million young men over decades. The Boy Scouts also have said a high-adventure base in Florida and another straddling Minnesota and Canada are unavailable to cover the organization’s liabilities, according to Friday’s court filing. The committee said that nothing in the deeds of the properties would prevent them from being sold to pay creditors, chiefly the men who suffered sexual misconduct at the hands of Boy Scouts volunteers. In a statement, the Boy Scouts said that the adventure camps and other assets it says are out of reach to creditors “are critical to delivering the mission of Scouting.” The committee is asking for a court ruling on how much Boy Scouts land, cash and investments can be held out of reach of creditors as negotiations continue in the largest-ever bankruptcy case driven by claims of sexual abuse.

Lawyers and survivors of childhood sexual abuse are reviewing more than 25,000 pages of internal Buffalo (N.Y.) Diocese documents relating to clergy abuse, diocesan finances and personnel files, the Buffalo News reported. Diocese lawyers began handing over the files in December under the terms of an agreement that they hashed out with abuse survivors who make up the committee of unsecured creditors in the diocese’s chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization, according to multiple sources. Whether the general public will be able to examine the confidential records someday remains unclear and likely will be subject to intense negotiations during the bankruptcy proceedings. In exchange for the records, the creditors committee agreed not to press forward with sex abuse lawsuits against individual parishes and other Catholic entities. The committee also agreed to keep confidential the contents of the diocese documents — at least for now.