Category: Litigation
9th Circuit decides Section 11 standing in a direct listing
When the SEC was considering the NYSE’s proposal to permit direct listings of primary offerings, one of the frequently raised problems related to the potential “vulnerability” of “shareholder legal rights under Section 11 of the Securities Act.” Section 11 provides standing to sue for misstatements in a registration statement to any person acquiring “such security,” typically interpreted to mean a security registered under the specific registration statement. The “vulnerability” was thought to arise as a result of the difficulty plaintiffs may have—in a direct listing where both registered and unregistered shares may be sold at the same time—in “tracing” the shares purchased back to the registration statement in question. In approving adoption of the NYSE rule, the SEC said that it did not “expect any such tracing challenges in this context to be of such magnitude as to render the proposal inconsistent with the Act. We expect judicial precedent on traceability in the direct listing context to continue to evolve,” pointing to Pirani v. Slack Technologies. As the NYSE had observed, only the district court in Slack had addressed the issue, and had concluded that, at the pleading stage, plaintiffs could still pursue their claims even if they could not definitively trace the securities they acquired to the registration statement. However, the NYSE noted, the case was on appeal. (See this PubCo post.) That appeal, Pirani v. Slack Technologies, has just been decided by a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit. The Court affirmed, with one dissent, the district court’s order, ruling that the plaintiff had standing to sue under Section 11.
SEC charges attorney rendering legal opinions with violations of Section 5
Attorneys who may think they can give short shrift to those pesky legal opinions to transfer agents might think twice after reading this complaint, SEC v. Frederick Bauman, filed on September 8, 2021, in the federal district court in Nevada. As described in the SEC’s litigation release, the SEC charged Bauman “with playing a critical role as an attorney who facilitated the unregistered sale of millions of shares of securities by two groups engaged in securities fraud.” According to the SEC’s complaint, between 2016 and August 2019, Bauman issued at least a dozen legal opinions to transfer agents advising that certain shares of four public companies were unrestricted and freely tradeable and that the holders of the shares were not affiliates of the public company issuers. However, the SEC alleged, the shareholders were actually part of groups that controlled those issuers, which made them affiliates under the securities laws. In “each instance where Bauman’s opinion letters violated Section 5,” the SEC alleged, “he lacked a reasonable basis for representing that the shareholders were not affiliates.” The complaint charged that the sales by these control groups were unregistered and violated Section 5 of the Securities Act and that Bauman violated Sections 5(a) and 5(c) of the Securities Act.
SEC charges Kraft Heinz with improper expense management scheme
On Friday, the SEC announced settled charges against Kraft Heinz Company, its Chief Operating Officer and Chief Procurement Officer for “engaging in a long-running expense management scheme that resulted in the restatement of several years of financial reporting.” According to the SEC’s Order regarding the company and the COO, as well as the SEC’s complaint against the CPO, the company employed a number of expense management strategies that “misrepresented the true nature of transactions,” including recognizing unearned discounts from suppliers, maintaining false and misleading supplier contracts and engaging in other accounting misconduct, all of which resulted in accounting errors and misstatements. The misconduct, the SEC contended, was designed to allow the company to report sham cost savings consistent with the operational efficiencies it had touted would result from the 2015 merger of Kraft and Heinz, as well as to inflate EBITDA—a critical earnings measure for the market—and to achieve certain performance targets. And, once again, charges of failure to design and implement effective internal controls played a prominent role. After the SEC began its investigation, KHC restated its financials, reversing “$208 million in improperly-recognized cost savings arising out of nearly 300 transactions.” According to Anita B. Bandy, Associate Director of Enforcement, “Kraft and its former executives are charged with engaging in improper expense management practices that spanned many years and involved numerous misleading transactions, millions in bogus cost savings, and a pervasive breakdown in accounting controls. The violations harmed investors who ultimately bore the costs and burdens of a restatement and delayed financial reporting….Kraft and its former executives are being held accountable for placing the pursuit of cost savings above compliance with the law.” KHC agreed to pay a civil penalty of $62 million. Interestingly, this case comes on the heels of an earnings management case brought by the SEC against Healthcare Services Group, Inc. for alleged failures to properly accrue and disclose litigation loss contingencies.
Are SPACs really “investment companies”?
Not according to 49 major law firms! Earlier this month, a shareholder of Pershing Square Tontine Holdings, Ltd., filed derivative litigation against the company’s board, its sponsor and other related companies, contending that the company, a SPAC organized by a billionaire hedge-fund investor, is really an investment company that should be registered under the Investment Company Act of 1940 and that its sponsor is really an investment adviser that should be registered under the Investment Advisers Act of 1940. Had they registered, so the argument goes, they would have been subject to substantial regulation regarding the rights of the SPAC’s shareholders and the form and amount of the SPAC managers’ compensation. According to the complaint, under the ICA, “an Investment Company is an entity whose primary business is investing in securities. And investing in securities is basically the only thing that PSTH has ever done.” The complaint sought “a declaratory judgment, damages, and rescission of contracts whose formation and performance violate” the ICA and IAA. What’s especially notable about the litigation—aside from its novel premise—is that the plaintiff’s lawyers include Yale law professor John Morley and Robert Jackson, an NYU law professor and former SEC Commissioner. Now, a group of 49 major law firms—including Cooley—have issued a joint statement pushing back on the plaintiff’s claims, asserting that there is no legal or factual basis for the allegation that SPACs are investment companies.
SEC charges healthcare services company engaged in earnings management
Yesterday, the SEC announced settled charges against Healthcare Services Group, Inc., a provider of housekeeping and other services to healthcare facilities, its CFO and its controller, for alleged failures to properly accrue and disclose litigation loss contingencies—accounting and disclosure violations that “enabled the company to report inflated quarterly [EPS] that met research analysts’ consensus estimates for multiple quarters.” This action is the result of SEC Enforcement’s “EPS Initiative, which uses risk-based data analytics to uncover potential accounting and disclosure violations caused by, among other things, earnings management practices.” Gurbir Grewal, the new Director of Enforcement, warned that the SEC will continue to leverage its “in-house data analytic capabilities to identify improper accounting and disclosure practices that mask volatility in financial performance, and continue to hold public companies and their executives accountable for their violations.” The company paid $6 million to settle the action. The SEC Order makes the matter of accruing for loss contingencies sound simple and straightforward, implying that the company’s behavior involved “big bath” accounting and other earnings management practices, and that may well be the case in this instance. However, in many cases, deciding whether, when and what to disclose or accrue for a loss contingency is not so clear cut and can often be a challenging exercise.
Petition filed for review of SEC approval of Nasdaq board diversity rule
It should hardly come as a surprise to anyone that the new Nasdaq board diversity rule (see this PubCo post) would be challenged in the courts. The rule was approved by the SEC on Friday, August 6. On Monday, August 9, the Alliance for Fair Board Recruitment filed a slim petition under Section 25(a) of the Exchange Act in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals—the Alliance has its principal place of business in Texas—for review of the SEC’s final order approving the Nasdaq rule. The petition itself is not particularly revealing, but it’s notable that the petitioner is also the most recent plaintiff challenging California’s two board diversity laws.
Is this insider trading?
On Tuesday, the SEC announced that it had filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court charging a former employee of Medivation Inc., an oncology-focused biopharma, with insider trading in advance of Medivation’s announcement that it would be acquired by a big pharma company. But it’s not what you might think. The employee didn’t trade in shares of Medivation or shares of the acquiror, nor did he tip anyone about the transaction. No, according to the SEC, he used the information about his employer’s acquisition to purchase call options on a separate biopharma company, Incyte Corporation, which the SEC claims was comparable to Medivation. According to the SEC, the employee made that purchase based on an assumption that the acquisition of Medivation at a healthy premium would probably boost the share price of Incyte. Incyte’s stock price increased after the sale of Medivation was announced. The SEC charged that the employee breached his “duty to refrain from using Medivation’s proprietary information for his own personal gain” and traded ahead of the announcement, in violation of Rule 10b-5. Will the SEC succeed or is the factual basis of the charge just too attenuated?
SEC charges another company for misleading cybersecurity disclosure
It’s déjà vu all over again! On Monday, the SEC announced settled charges against Pearson plc, an NYSE-listed, educational publishing and services company based in London, for failure to disclose a cybersecurity breach. You might recall that just a few months ago, the SEC announced settled charges against another company for failure to timely disclose a cybersecurity vulnerability that led to a leak of data, with disclosure ultimately spurred by imminent media reports. Is there a trend here? In this instance, it wasn’t just a vulnerability—there was an actual known breach and exfiltration of private data. Nevertheless, Pearson decided not to disclose it and framed its cybersecurity risk factor disclosure as purely hypothetical. The SEC viewed that disclosure as misleading and imposed a civil penalty on Pearson of $1 million. The case serves as yet another reminder of the dangers of risk disclosures presented as hypothetical when those risks have actually come to fruition—a presentation that has now repeatedly drawn scrutiny in the context of cybersecurity disclosure.
SEC steps back from two of the 2020 amendments to the whistleblower rules
The SEC’s whistleblower program provides for awards in amounts between 10% and 30% of the monetary sanctions collected in an SEC action based on the whistleblower’s original information. The program, which has been in place for more than ten years, is widely acknowledged to have been a resounding success. In September 2020, the SEC adopted a number of amendments to the whistleblower rules, some of which were quite controversial. In early August, SEC Chair Gary Gensler issued a statement indicating that he had directed the SEC staff to revisit the whistleblower rules, in particular, two of the amendments that had been adopted in 2020. (See this PubCo post.) Gensler observed that concerns have been raised, including by whistleblowers as well as by Commissioners Allison Herren Lee and Caroline Crenshaw, that those amendments “could discourage whistleblowers from coming forward.” Now, the SEC has issued a policy statement advising how the SEC will proceed in the interim while changes to those rules are under consideration. Commissioners Hester Peirce and Elad Roisman were none too pleased with the SEC’s action here, questioning whether it might be part of a troubling pattern of unwinding actions taken by the last Administration. They made their views known in this statement.
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