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The hearing in a Richmond, Va., federal bankruptcy court was jammed. Alpha Natural Resources Inc., a coal producer, had filed for chapter 11 protection, and dozens of creditors were there to find out how the company’s assets would be divvied up. The company and its advisers, including the restructuring unit of McKinsey & Co., had devised a reorganization plan that would split the company in two, the Wall Street Journal reported. In exchange for their defaulted loans, secured lenders would receive ownership stakes in a new company that would own ANR’s most profitable mines. Unsecured creditors, including pensioners and environmental claimants, would share in revenue from ANR’s lesser remaining operations. Judge Kevin R. Huennekens approved the plan, which had the backing of creditors. At that July 2016 hearing, a lawyer for Citigroup Inc., one of the senior lenders, called the case “an example of how a chapter 11 truly should work.” The creditors, however, didn’t have all the facts about ANR adviser McKinsey when they voted to support the plan a month before the hearing. They didn’t know a McKinsey retirement plan had a $110 million investment in a hedge fund, run by Whitebox Advisors, which held a stake in ANR’s senior debt. That gave McKinsey a financial interest in the new company’s fate. Nor did they know that another senior lender, Barclays Bank PLC, was a McKinsey client. A Wall Street Journal analysis of disclosure filings in all 13 chapter 11 cases in which McKinsey’s restructuring unit, called McKinsey RTS, has participated shows the company routinely discloses far fewer names and descriptions of connections than other advisers. McKinsey initially identified by name a total of 59 connections to participating debtors, creditors, lawyers and accountants in those cases. The roughly 45 other bankruptcy professionals involved in those cases, including law firms, accounting firms and restructuring advisers, reported more than 15,000 named connections in total. On average, McKinsey reported five such relationships per case compared with the other firms’ disclosures of 171 connections each.