Articles Posted in Class Action Lawsuits

According to the Irving Firemen’s Relief and Retirement Fund, Tesco PLC and its directors misled investors, purportedly causing the Texas pension fund to buy the company’s stock at prices that were artificially inflated. Because of this, says the fund, it sustained substantial losses when Tesco announced in September that it had overstated profits because of accounting irregularities.

The supermarket chain’s shares plunged after it disclosed that certain income was booked prior to being earned and costs were identified after they were incurred. Last month, Tesco said that it had overstated profits by $422 million.

The Irving pension fund wants to get class action status. It wants to represent Tescho shareholders who bought the company’s American depository receipts, representing one ordinary share each, between February 2 and September 22, 2014. In its securities fraud case, the Texas fund contended that Tesco purposely deceived the public.

Fannie Mae (FNMA) and its shareholders have reached a $170M settlement in a lawsuit accusing the entity of misleading the plaintiffs about its risk management, finances, and mortgage exposure prior to its seizure by the U.S. government during the financial crisis of 2008. Now, a court must approve the agreement.

The lead plaintiffs are the Tennessee Consolidated Retirement System, the State-Boston Retirement Board, and the Massachusetts Pension Reserves Investment Management Board, which are trying to obtain class action securities status for their case. The shareholders claim that Fannie Mae defrauded them, as well as inflated its stock via misleading and false statements about capitalization, internal controls, exposure to low-documentation “Alt-A” mortgages, subprime mortgages, and accounting.

Per the agreement, $123.8 million would go to common stockholder and Preferred stockholders would get $46.2 million. The stockholders would come from the period running from 11/8/06 to 9/5/08. During that time, Fannie Mae’s market value hit a peak of over $60 billion. Its current market value is $2.71 million.

JPMorgan Ordered to Face $10B Mortgage-Backed Securities Case

A federal judge said that JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) must face a class action securities fraud lawsuit filed by investors accusing the bank of misleading them about the risks involved in $10B of mortgage-backed securities that they purchased from the firm prior to the financial crisis.

U.S. District Judge Paul Oetken certified a class action as to the bank’s liability but not for damages. He said it wasn’t clear how investors were able to value the certificates they purchased considering that the market hadn’t been especially liquid. He did, however, say that the plaintiffs could attempt again to seek class certification on class damages.

The trial over whether the U.S. government unlawfully seized a majority stake in American International Group Inc. (AIG) during the bailout has started. The securities case was brought by Starr International Co., which is the charitable and investment firm helmed by former AIG CEO Maurice R. Greenberg. Starr was the insurer’s biggest shareholder when the company became a ward of the government at the height of the economic crisis.

The lawsuit, now a class action case, claims that government violated the rights of shareholders to receive fair compensation under the U.S. Constitution. Some 300,000 AIG stockholders from 2008 and 2009, including AIG employees, large mutual fund companies, and retirees, would be entitled to any award issued to Starr. Greenberg wants about $40 billion in compensation over the government takeover and the high interest rates the U.S. charged for the loans. AIG is not one of the plaintiffs.

The insurance giant got into financial trouble in the wake of the financial crisis mostly because of sales of an insurance of the unregulated variety to banks and others, which was intended to mitigate debt exposure risks. The government loaned AIG $85 billion in 2008 to keep it from falling into bankruptcy. In opening statements, Kenneth Dintzer, a lawyer for the U.S., noted that the insurance company’ shareholders hugely benefitted from the efforts made to stabilize AIG. The government maintains that it had to bailout AIG to keep the world economy from collapsing.

Fidelity Investments has consented to pay $12 million to settle two class action employee lawsuits. The plaintiffs contend that the retirement plan provider was self-dealing in the FMR LLC Profit Sharing Plan and making money at their expense by offering employees high-cost fund options and making them pay excessive fees.

Over 50,000 ex- and present employees are eligible to receive from the settlement. Fidelity is accused of providing just its own funds in the retirement plan for its workers, with certain investment options having little (if any) track record, while failing to use an impartial process when choosing the investment options.

As part of the agreement, Fidelity Investments will now give employees a choice of non-Fidelity and Fidelity mutual funds, increase auto-enrollment to 7%, and allow participants of non-Fidelity mutual funds to benefit from revenue sharing, just like the participants of Fidelity mutual funds and collective trusts. The company also will keep offering a default investment alternative, the Fidelity Freedom Funds-Class. The Portfolio Advisory Services at Work program will be provided for free.

Ruling in Halliburton v. Erica P. John Fund, the U.S. Supreme Court has left the fraud-on-the-market theory intact. However, they may have made it easier for large companies to get the courts to throw out class action securities cases sooner.

Halliburton Co. wanted to block a class action lawsuit accusing the company of inflating its stock price. A number of investors are claiming that they lost money after the stock price fell following news that it misrepresented revenues, overstated a merger’s benefits, and understated its liability in asbestos litigation.

Under the theory, securities fraud lawyers can use stock prices as proof that a company took part in fraud without having to prove that investors depended on company statements (or omissions of statements) when making decisions. Many corporate lawyers had hoped that the court would get rid of the 1988 precedent it made when it ruled in Basic V. Levinson more than 25 years ago. However, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the opinion for the justices that Halliburton didn’t offer any “special justification” for overruling the fraud-on-the-market presumption. (Justice Clarence Thomas, who ruled unanimously with the court, issued a separate opinion and was joined by Justices Samuel Alito and Antonin Scala. He said that Basic should have been overruled.)

Wells Fargo Settles Securities Lending Case for $62.5M

Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC) will pay $62.5 million to settle a class action securities fraud case. A group of retirement funds claim that the bank committed fraud and breached its fiduciary duty in its securities lending program. Now, a district court judge must preliminarily approve the agreement.

Wells Fargo promoted its securities lending program to large institutional investors, including insurance companies, pension funds, and foundations. The bank would lend the clients’ securities to third-party brokerage firms. For lending the securities, the bank was given cash collateral. It then invested the funds, sharing returns with the clients. The program was marketed as a means for institutional investors to make additional funds to cover the cost of having Wells Fargo maintain their investment portfolios.

Timothy C. Davidson, a Florida investment adviser, is suing BlackRock (BLK). He says the money manager and other defendants breached their fiduciary duty by charging disproportionately high investment advisory fees for the BlackRock Global Allocation Fund (MDLOX). He says that the excessive fees had “no reasonable relationship” to the services that the firm provided.

Because of the alleged wrongdoing, Davidson contends, BlackRock Advisors was able to keep most of the benefits that stemmed from a growth in assets that were under management without properly sharing these with the fund or shareholders. The investment advisor also says that the fund’s board did not behave “conscientiously” when it approved markups and fees and this breaches certain obligations under the Investment Company Act of 1940.

The BlackRock Global Allocation Fund manages about $60 billion. Davidson said that a trust he helped establish owned $1 million of shares in the fund’s institutional share class. (David helped form the trust after he bought a lottery ticket that won the Powerball in 2011.)

According to a study commissioned by the US Chamber Institute for Legal Reform, securities class action lawsuits are not a help to investors seeking to recover their investment losses. The study, which was released by Navigant Consulting, found that class action litigation costs investors close to $39 billion annually even as they recover only about $5 billion.

To arrive at the finding, the authors of the calculated the wealth lost by shareholders when lawsuits were announced right after a class period had ended. Usually, at this point, the class members consisted largely of the same shareholders who experienced the first drop. Per the study, a significant percentage of proceeds from the settlement was given to plaintiffs who almost always would not have recovered anything if a securities case was litigated. However, said the authors, after looking at 50 allocation plans for large settlement, they discovered that when redistribution of the wealth happens it hardly resembles the alleged injury. Instead, an analysis of more than 14,000 class action securities cases from 1996 to now showed, shareholders who were alleged fraud victims and the plaintiffs of these claims sustained “an incremental wealth loss” of over $262 billion because class action securities cases were filed.

In a report also issued last month based on its own study, consumer advocacy group Public Citizen found that it is private securities lawsuits that are effective when it comes to deterring fraud. Lisa Golber, the co-author of the study. said that institutional investors widely see these cases as a way to keep up their investments’ sustainability. The report found that private securities fraud cases compensate investors and do what the SEC sometimes can’t because of its lack of resources.

Although a decision is not likely until June in Halliburton v. Erica P. John Fund, it doesn’t look as if the US Supreme Court will seek to overturn the “fraud on the market” theory, set up in 1988 in Basic Inc. v. Levinson. In that earlier ruling, it was determined that investors are allowed to depend on a presumption that the stock price of a company reflected all public information about the entity. This theory has allowed investors to ban together through class action securities certification without having to provide individual reliance of evidence.

In the securities case before the court, the investors’ fund claims that Halliburton misrepresented its liability related to asbestos litigation, benefits obtained from a merger, and revenue from a construction contract. Meantime, Halliburton and its allies are contending that investors shouldn’t be able to bring a class action case because of an economic theory that is based on the efficiency of markets.

Four of the justices recently appeared to be welcoming a challenge to the fraud on the market theory. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote in a concurrence in Amgen V. Connecticut Retirement Plans and Trust Funds that there has been evidence recently to indicate that such a presumption may be based on a “faulty economic premise.”

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