US justice Samuel Alito defends fishing trip with billionaire Paul Singer

US Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito has insisted there was “no obligation” to recuse himself from cases involving a hedge-fund billionaire who paid for the judge to go fishing in Alaska on a private jet.

The undeclared hospitality offered by Paul Singer, a prominent conservative fund manager who has won favourable rulings from the court, is the latest in a series of propriety questions that have cast a shadow over the US’s highest court.

Alito accepted Singer’s offer to join him on a luxury fishing trip to an Alaskan salmon lodge in 2008, then did not declare the trip or the air travel provided, according to a report by US news organisation ProPublica.

Alito, six years later, then voted in favour of a fund affiliated to Singer in Republic of Argentina vs NML Capital, a landmark case over Argentina’s debt restructuring that ultimately generated billions for the hedge fund.

ProPublica posed questions to Alito but rather than respond, the judge wrote an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal denying any impropriety in the arrangements and claiming ProPublica “misleads its readers” with an article that had yet to be published.

He argued that accepting Singer’s offer of a seat on the private flight to Alaska, which the judge claimed “would have otherwise been vacant”, was the lower cost option and fell under a “personal hospitality” exception for disclosure.

The revelations come after ProPublica in April reported that another justice on the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas, had failed to disclose decades of gifts and luxury travel from another billionaire Republican donor, Harlan Crow.

Thomas claimed at the time that he was not obliged to disclose hospitality and gifts from “close personal friends, who did not have business before the court”.

Singer is the conservative founder and president of activist hedge fund Elliott Management. The fund is known for aggressive, often litigious, campaigns to make its investments pay off. Elliott’s tactics have included forcing chief executives out and challenging governments, such as South Korea and Argentina, in the courts.

A hedge fund affiliated with Elliott Management, NML, was one of the so-called “vulture investors” that bought distressed Argentine sovereign debt at a discount in the early 2000s and attempted to force the country to repay it in full.

In 2014 the US supreme court ruled 7-1 against Argentina’s claim of sovereign immunity and upheld a previous ruling that allowed NML to pursue the indebted nation for the full amount owed. Alito voted with the majority.

Singer’s hedge fund came before the US supreme court “at least 10 times” in the years following the trip to Alaska, according to ProPublica. Most recently in 2019 the court declined to intervene in a dispute between a utility company and Singer’s fund. A request by a bank for the court to intervene in another dispute with the fund is still pending.

“I had no obligation to recuse in any of the cases that ProPublica cites. First, even if I had been aware of Mr Singer’s connection to the entities involved in those cases, recusal would not have been required or appropriate,” Alito wrote in response to the allegations.

Singer did not immediately respond for comment. His spokesperson told ProPublica that Singer “never discussed his business interests” with Alito and at the time of the trip in 2008.

The Judicial Conference of the United States, which makes policy for the country’s federal courts, earlier this year adopted stricter rules requiring justices to disclose more of their activities, including travel by private jet and stays at hotels and resorts. Stays at personal vacation homes, however, remain exempt from reporting requirements.