Where's The Accountability?

Attorney: Tamar A. Weinrib
Pomerantz Monitor November/December 2015

At a conference last year, SEC Chair Mary Jo White began by asserting that “strong enforcement of our securities laws is critical to protecting investors and maintaining their confidence and to safeguarding the stability of our markets.” She went on to suggest that one of the SEC’s primary roles is to “bring wrongdoers to account and to send the strongest possible message of deterrence to would-be fraudsters.”

However, often the message sent is hardly one of deterrence. Many an SEC settlement amounts to nothing more than a mere “cost of business” for the wrongdoer, which is ultimately borne by the shareholders, particularly where the settlement terms do not require any accountability. Indeed, it was for precisely this reason that Judge Rakoff initially rejected the SEC’s $285 million settlement with Citigroup in 2011 that stemmed from the bank’s sale of mortgage-backed securities that cost investors $700 million but yielded a $160 million profit for the bank. Judge Rakoff referred to the settlement, which required no admission of wrongdoing, as “pocket change.”

Although the SEC has obtained admissions of wrongdoing in some cases, the Citigroup settlement was not unique in its failure to require Citigroup to either admit or deny liability (indeed Judge Rakoff rejected a settlement between the SEC and Bank of America in 2009 for similar reasons) but it prompted Judge Rakoff to proclaim that it “is neither fair, nor reasonable, nor adequate, nor in the public interest.” Just last month, the SEC entered into yet another settlement with two units of Citigroup that holds no one at the bank accountable for selling municipal bonds to wealthy clients for six years as a safe money option despite the innate risk resulting from considerable leverage, which caused investors to lose an estimated $2 billion. This settlement, for $180 million, like the settlement in 2011, did not require Citigroup to either admit or deny wrongdoing. Once again, it is the innocent investors who will bear the settlement cost.

The SEC is not alone in its zeal to settle claims with no accountability. The New York State Attorney General announced a settlement with Bank of America and former CEO Ken Lewis in 2014 over statements made in connection with the 2008 BofA and Merrill Lynch merger. Specifically, the SEC accused BofA of failing to reveal the truth about $9 billion in losses at Merrill Lynch before voting to approve the merger. After the merger, BofA needed a federal bailout partly because of the increasing losses at Merrill Lynch, and investors suffered when shares took a nosedive. The $25 million settlement did not require any admission of wrongdoing by either BofA or Lewis. Moreover,

BofA ultimately paid the $10 million of the settlement amount that Lewis was supposed to pay. In other words,

Lewis walked away from the settlement unscathed and therefore undeterred. Settlements such as these are ineffectual at deterring future misconduct by either the settling party or other entities and executives.

The question, however, is what the consequences are of the alternative. There exists a particularly sharp double-edged sword when considering the nature of the “deterrent.” The obvious concern is that if regulators continue to enter settlements that require no admissions of wrongdoing, those settlements will unlikely deter future misconduct but rather create a cost of business that further victimizes, rather than protects, investors. However, on the flip side, if regulators were to require admissions of wrongdoing as a condition to any settlement, the risk is that far fewer such actions/investigations would result in a settlement. Companies hesitant to admit any wrongdoing lest an investor or other party use that admission against it in a private lawsuit will not as readily agree to settle, which will undoubtedly result in protracted and costly litigation with uncertain outcomes. The question is what is the true goal --- to deter future misconduct as regulators consistently proclaim or to settle as many actions as possible, thereby avoiding the costs of lengthy litigation and the withering of budgetary constraints?

 Perhaps the greatest deterrent to securities fraud would be criminal prosecutions of individual wrongdoers, which is the prerogative of the Justice Department. The track record there has, if anything, been even spottier. The recent spate of insider trading convictions has been drastically undermined by the Second Circuit’s landmark ruling in the Newman case, which raises the bar dramatically for insider trading convictions. Other types of securities fraud criminal convictions of individuals are almost completely nonexistent.

 

Shareholder Approval Of Merger Held To Eliminate Claims Against Conflicted Investment Bankers

Attorney: Matthew C. Moehlman
Pomerantz Monitor November/December 2015

On October 29, 2015, Vice Chancellor Parsons of the Delaware Court of Chancery dismissed the sole remaining claim in In re Zale Corporation Stockholder Litigation, the shareholder suit arising from Zale’s 2014 merger with Signet Jewelers Ltd. The Zale opinion, in which Parsons reversed his own earlier ruling in light of binding new precedent from the Delaware Supreme Court, serves as a blunt reminder to investors that Delaware courts are highly reluctant to meddle with the decisions of corporate boards.

In the suit, the Zale plaintiffs had alleged that they were cashed out of their investment at an unreasonably low price due to the involvement of a conflicted financial advisor, Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Zale’s Board of Directors retained Merrill Lynch to advise it as to the financial fairness of the merger. In accepting the engagement, Merrill Lynch failed to inform the Board that it had recently met with Signet to pitch an acquisition of Zale. Notably, the same Merrill Lynch investment banker who led the team advising Zale’s Board had also led the team that pitched to Signet. Further, in the pitch meeting, Merrill Lynch had suggested that Zale pay no more than $21 per share for Zale, and ultimately, the merger was approved by Zale’s Board for an acquisition price of $21 per share. Finally, while Merrill Lynch ultimately informed the Board of its meeting with Signet, it waited to do so until after the merger was announced.

On those allegations, the plaintiffs asserted a claim for breach of fiduciary duty against the Board for insufficiently vetting Merrill Lynch for potential conflicts of interest, and against Merrill Lynch for aiding and abetting the Board’s breach by concealing the conflict from it. Plaintiffs sued Merrill Lynch as aiders and abettors because the bankers owed no fiduciary duties to shareholders.

Initially, Vice Chancellor Parsons found that the plaintiffs had plausibly alleged that Zale’s Board had breached its duty of care to shareholders by not ferreting out Merrill Lynch’s conflict. Parsons noted that Zale had “rather quickly decided to use Merrill Lynch, the only candidate they considered,” and did not ask probing questions designed to detect conflicts of interest, such as whether the bank had made any presentations regarding Zale to prospective buyers within the last six months. Nevertheless, Parsons dismissed the Board from the suit due to an exculpatory charter provision—a protection permitted by Delaware statute that insulates directors from damage claims based on breach of their duty of care. But Parsons sustained the aiding and abetting claim against Merrill Lynch for failing to promptly disclose its meeting with Signet to the Board, which potentially allowed Signet to have the upper hand in negotiations.

However, the day after Parsons issued his opinion, the Delaware Supreme Court undercut it. Specifically, in Corwin v. KKR Financial Holdings LLC, the high court held that a fully-informed vote by an uncoerced majority of disinterested stockholders invoked the deferential “business judgment” standard of review. Practically speaking, business judgment review precludes second guessing of Board decisions, and its application is typically outcome-determinative against shareholder plaintiffs.

The Zales-Signet merger had been approved by 53% of Zale’s shareholders. Accordingly, under Corwin, Parsons should have evaluated the Board’s conduct in vetting Merrill Lynch under the business judgment standard. Parsons had instead applied the stricter “enhanced scrutiny” standard of review. Parsons held that enhanced scrutiny was appropriate under the Delaware Supreme Court’s 2009 decision in Gantler v. Stephens, which he found did not mandate business judgment review where a shareholder vote was statutorily required. Corwin clarified that Parsons had misread Gantler. Corwin said where the approving shareholders were disinterested, fully-informed and uncoerced, it did not matter whether their vote was required or purely voluntary—business judgment was the standard of review. Corwin thus made it exceptionally difficult to find that Zale’s Board had breached its duty of care to shareholders. And because Merrill Lynch’s liability as an aider and abettor was predicated on the Board’s duty breach, the Corwin holding benefitted it as well.

So, after politely holding off for three days —no doubt to give the Zale plaintiffs time to wind up their affairs and come to terms with the inevitable—Merrill Lynch moved for reargument in light of the holding in Corwin. Parsons saved Merrill Lynch the trouble, reconsidering his earlier ruling and dismissing the bank from the case. Perhaps showing his ambivalence at the result, he observed that, “The conduct of Merrill Lynch in this case is troubling, and it was disclosed only belatedly to the Zale Board.”

In a broad sense, the Zale opinions, and the holding in Corwin, illustrate the substantial protections that Delaware continues to afford the directors of companies incorporated there—estimated to be 50% of all U.S. public corporations. By clarifying that banker conflicts may be scrutinized less after a merger receives shareholder approval, it also marks an important qualification to the series of scathing banker conflict opinions that have boiled out of the Court of Chancery in recent years.

For example, in In re Del Monte Foods Co. Shareholders Litigation, Vice Chancellor J. Travis Laster found that Del Monte’s financial advisor Barclays PLC had “secretly and selfishly manipulated the sales process to engineer a transaction that would permit Barclays to obtain lucrative buy-side financing fees.” Likewise, in In re El Paso Corporation Shareholder Litigation, former Chancellor, now Chief Justice of the Delaware Supreme Court, Leo Strine skewered El Paso Board advisor Goldman Sachs for “troubling” conduct that led him to conclude that the transaction was “tainted by disloyalty.” And in In re Rural/Metro Corporation Stockholders Litigation, Vice Chancellor Laster took aim at RBC Capital for steering Rural/Metro’s Board to consummate a deal with an acquirer that RBC secretly hoped would hire it to provide financing for the transaction.

Such rulings are salutary because they recognize that bankers wield considerable influence in merger transactions, and that a self-interested sell-side banker can prevent shareholders from realizing maximum value when cashed out of their investments. As the outcome in Zale shows, Corwin makes it that much more difficult to show director liability after a merger has been consummated. The further rub for investors is that, after Corwin, bankers enjoy more flexibility to act selfishly and against shareholders’ interests —so long as they make the perfunctory disclosures, the deal gets done, and the merger is approved.

 

Petrobras Court: Opt-Outs Beware

Attorney: Mark B. Goldstein
Pomerantz Monitor November/December 2015
 

As reported in previous issues of the Monitor, Pomerantz is lead counsel in a class action lawsuit against the Brazilian oil giant Petrobras. Lead Plaintiff Universities Superannuation Scheme Limited and additional institutional plaintiffs allege securities fraud violations that stem from a large-scale undisclosed bribery and money-laundering scheme that caused tens of billions of dollars of damages to shareholders. On July 9, 2015, the court denied most of defendants’ motions to dismiss, upholding, most notably all of our Securities and Exchange Act claims. The class includes investors who purchased their Petrobras shares after January 22, 2010.

Some investors had decided to opt out of our class action, and to file individual suits. Defendants moved to dismiss their claims as well; and on October 19, 2015, Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the Southern District of New York dismissed their claims “to the extent such claims under Section 10(b) of the Exchange Act cover purchases prior to June 2, 2010, on the ground that such claims are barred by the statute of repose.”

In our class action, by contrast, the court upheld claims going back six months earlier, to January 22, 2010. Therefore, by opting out, these individual plaintiffs forfeited six months’ worth of claims.

 The statute of repose for the Exchange Act bars claims brought more than five years after the occurrence of the fraud. The fraud is deemed to have occurred on either the date the investor purchased the stock or the date of the act or transaction constituting the violation.

 Unlike a statute of limitations, the statute of repose is not concerned with when the investor discovers that he or she has a claim for securities fraud. It acts as a bar to all claims under the securities laws and begins to run from the date the investor purchased the security or from the date of the act or transaction constituting the violation. This five year period had not yet run on any of our claims when we brought our class action.

In opposing the motion to dismiss, the opt-out plaintiffs argued that the statute of repose should be tolled (stopped) for the period these plaintiffs were part of the class. In a case called American Pipe the Supreme Court held that such tolling applied to the statute of limitations: “the commencement of a class action suspends the applicable statute of limitations as to all asserted members of the class.” There currently exists a split among the circuits regarding whether the American Pipe doctrine applies to plaintiffs who elect to opt out of a pending class action prior to a decision on class certification, and a number of district courts, the Sixth Circuit, and the First Circuit have held that tolling of the statute of limitations is not available in such circumstance.

 However, in a case called IndyMac, the Second Circuit held two years ago that the statute of repose under the Exchange Act is not covered by American Pipe tolling. In particular, the Second Circuit ruled, “in contrast to statutes of limitations, statutes of repose create a substantive right in those protected to be free from liability after a legislatively- determined period of time.” The reasoning is that the statute of repose allows issuers and underwriters of securities to know, by a date certain, when all potential claims arising out of a particular securities issuance have been extinguished. This holding was followed by Judge Rakoff when he dismissed the opt-out plaintiffs’ claims covering Petrobras purchases prior to June 2, 2010.

While there may sometimes be good reasons for institutions with large claims to opt out of a class and bring their own actions, they do so at the risk that they will lose some of their claims because of the statute of repose.

Pomerantz Beats The “Adverse Interest” Exception Again

Attorneys: Marc C. Gorrie and Emma Gilmore
Pomerantz Monitor November/December 2015

A few months ago the Monitor reported that Pomerantz had defeated a motion to dismiss our Petrobras action, persuading the District Court to reject a defense based on the so-called “adverse interest” rule. There we persuaded the court that the company, Petrobras, a Brazilian company, could be responsible for frauds committed by its senior executives. Contrary to the company’s arguments, the court concluded that Petrobras derived some benefits from the frauds and its interests were therefore not entirely adverse to those of the individual wrongdoers.

Now we have prevailed over that defense again, this time in a case involving a Chinese company, ChinaCast. In a resounding victory for the firm and the class of investors we represent, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in a question of first impression, unanimously held that a senior corporate employee’s fraud is imputed to the corporation even when the fraud actually is completely adverse to the company’s interests. ChinaCast is a for-profit, post-secondary education and e-learning service provider that gives courses online and on three physical campuses in China. Founded in 1999, its shares traded on the NASDAQ Global Select Market, at one time boasting a market capitalization of over $200 million. In March of 2011 ChinaCast filed a Form 10-K with the Securities and Exchange Commission in which it disclosed that its out-side accounting firm, Deloitte Tohmatsu CPA, Ltd., had identified “serious control weaknesses” in its financial oversight systems.

Both sides in our case essentially agreed on the underlying facts. A massive fraud occurred at ChinaCast when its CEO and founder, Ron Chan Tze Ngon, looted the company and brought it to financial ruin. Chan improperly transferred $120 million of corporate assets to bank accounts that he and his associates controlled, allowed a vice president to transfer $5.6 million in Company funds to his son, transferred control of two colleges outside of the Company, and pledged $37 million in company funds to secure loans unrelated to ChinaCast’s business.

Afterwards, Chan and ChinaCast’s CFO Antonio Sena failed to disclose this critical information to investors. Instead, through a series of earnings calls and SEC filings, they assured the market of ChinaCast’s financial stability and sound accounting controls. When the extent of the scheme was finally uncovered in early 2012, ChinaCast’s Board of Directors removed Chan as CEO, and Sena stepped down. Several class action suits were commenced on behalf of investors in the Central District of California in September 2012, and Pomerantz was appointed Lead Counsel for the class.

The district court dismissed plaintiff’s claims on the grounds that scienter, a “bedrock requirement” of a suit brought under Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, was not adequately pled against ChinaCast. Scienter requires a plaintiff to plead facts creating a “strong inference” that the corporation acted with “intent to deceive, manipulate, or defraud.” The district court found that the actions and intentions of Chan and his accomplices, however detestable, could not be imputed to ChinaCast under the “adverse interest” rule.

The general rule in securities fraud cases is that a corporate executive’s scienter is imputed to the company, as the company can only act, and formulate intent, through its employees. Where the executive is high enough in the corporate hierarchy, such as CEO Chan was here, his knowledge is the knowledge of the company. However, the adverse interest exception precludes imputation of knowledge where the employee acts solely in his own interest, injuring the corporation. The district court held that Chan’s frauds benefited himself at the expense of the corporation, and therefore satisfied the adverse interest exception to the imputation rule.

On appeal, the Ninth Circuit reversed this ruling. Pomerantz managing partner Marc Gross persuaded the court that a longstanding exception to the adverse interest exception applied. Known as the “apparent authority” or “innocent third party” exception to the exception, this doctrine “holds where a person reasonably relies upon the apparent authority of an agent, that misconduct of the agent is therefore imputed to the corporation, in this case the CEO and the company,” even if the misconduct is detrimental to the company. Pomerantz argued that imputing knowledge when innocent third parties are involved advances public policy goals in that it is the company that has selected and delegated responsibility to its executives, the doctrine creates incentives for corporations to do so carefully and responsibly.

The Ninth Circuit agreed, holding that “the adverse interest rule collapses in the face of an innocent third party who relies on the agent’s apparent authority.” In other words, a corporation can be held liable to investors even where officer’s actions are adverse to that corporation’s interest when they rely in good faith on that officer’s representations.”

The Ninth Circuit’s opinion is significant because it adopts a bright-light rule where, on a well-pled complaint, “having a clean hands plaintiff eliminates the adverse interest exception in fraud on the market suits because a bona fide plaintiff will always be an innocent third party.”

Managing Partner Marc Gross, who argued before the Ninth Circuit panel, stated that Pomerantz is “very pleased that the Ninth Circuit has made clear that corporations are accountable for defrauding investors, as they should be, even when the company’s own coffers have been looted by its own officers. After all, the corporation hired the officers and should be held responsible for how their misconduct impacts innocent investors."