Category: Litigation
PLI panel offers hot tips on accounting and auditing issues
At the PLI Securities Regulation Institute last week, the accounting and auditing update panel provided some useful insights—especially for non-accountants. The panel covered the new requirements for segment reporting, the intensified focus on controls, PCAOB activities (including NOCLAR) and errors and materiality. Below are some takeaways.
Fifth Circuit dismisses NCPPR appeal of Corp Fin’s Rule 14a-8 no-action relief
You might recall that, in 2023, the National Center for Public Policy Research submitted a shareholder proposal to The Kroger Co., which operates supermarkets, regarding the omission of consideration of “viewpoint” and “ideology” from its equal employment opportunity policy. Kroger sought to exclude the proposal as “ordinary business” under Rule 14a-8(i)(7), and Corp Fin concurred. After Corp Fin and the SEC refused reconsideration of the decision, NCPPR petitioned the Fifth Circuit for review. The SEC moved to dismiss the appeal. But after the NCPPR filed its appeal, Kroger filed its proxy materials with the SEC and included the NCPPR proposal in the proxy materials to be submitted for a shareholder vote. The proposal received less than two percent of the vote. Now, a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit has issued its opinion, dismissing the case for lack of jurisdiction; Judge Edith Jones dissented.
Court denies Chamber’s motion for summary judgment that California climate disclosure laws violate First Amendment
Given the impending change in Administration in D.C.—and all that portends for regulation—the States may, in many ways, take on much larger significance. Case in point: California’s climate disclosure laws and the ongoing litigation challenges there. In January, the U.S. and California Chambers of Commerce, the American Farm Bureau Federation and others filed a complaint (and in February, an amended complaint) against two executives of the California Air Resources Board and the California Attorney General challenging these two California laws. The lawsuit seeks declaratory relief that the two laws are void because they violate the First Amendment, are precluded under the Supremacy Clause by the Clean Air Act, and are invalid under the Constitution’s limitations on extraterritorial regulation, particularly under the dormant Commerce Clause. The litigation also seeks injunctive relief to prevent CARB from taking any action to enforce these two laws. (See this PubCo post.) California then filed a motion to dismiss the amended complaint for lack of subject matter jurisdiction and failure to state a claim. Interestingly, however, the motion did not seek dismissal of Plaintiffs’ First Amendment claim (except as to the Attorney General, whom the motion seeks to exclude altogether on the basis of sovereign immunity), even though California asserted that Plaintiffs’ First Amendment challenge was “legally flawed.” The Plaintiffs then moved for summary judgment on the First Amendment claim, and California moved to deny that motion or to defer it, enabling the parties to conduct discovery. In this Order, issued on election day, the Federal District Court for the Central District of California denied Plaintiffs’ motion to dismiss and granted California’s motion to deny or defer the motion for summary judgment.
What happens when amplified SEC litigation challenges meet budget constraints?
Annually, the SEC’s Office of Inspector General offers its “independent perspective” on the “top management and performance challenges” facing the SEC. What stands out in the 2024 Inspector General’s Statement on the SEC’s Management and Performance Challenges? It’s that the SEC is confronting several serious challenges—particularly significant litigation challenges to its rulemaking—but, at the same time, is facing serious budget constraints. Not only have many of the recent rulemakings been challenged in court, but, in light of SCOTUS’s decision last term in Loper Bright, which put the kibosh on Chevron deference, the OIG expects that “SEC rulemaking will continue to face searching judicial scrutiny.” In addition, the OIG predicts that the “current regulatory environment may lead to increased forum shopping by petitioners and extended periods of uncertainty about the permissible scope of agency action.” In light of this heightened judicial scrutiny, the OIG advises, the SEC “must continue to develop a thorough administrative record, including meaningful opportunity for public participation and reasoned responses to public submissions. The SEC already invests considerable resources toward these ends, but should be prepared for additional litigation, as industry and public interest groups may take opportunities to challenge regulations.” At the same time, the OIG cautions, the dearth of resources under the current budget environment “may hinder the Agency’s ability to meet these challenges, mitigate its risks, and pursue its vital mission.” In particular, as a result of flat funding for fiscal 2024, the SEC was required to freeze hiring and eliminate certain employee benefits, while increased “personnel costs limit the resources available to update and improve legacy information systems, including information security.” Yet, “the changing regulatory environment will likely increase operational demands on the Agency and its staff,” rendering the financial constraints all the more problematic.
You can probably tell that this post was written prior to the vote count last night. The election results and coming change in
Administration will certainly affect the SEC’s rulemaking agenda and probably its litigation posture; however, to the extent that Democrats adopt a litigation strategy with regard to rulemaking by the new Administration that follows the current Republican playbook, many of the challenges identified by the OIG could well remain.
SEC Enforcement mini-sweep charges hypothetical risk factors and other misleading cyber disclosures
On Tuesday, the SEC announced settled charges against four companies for “making materially misleading disclosures regarding cybersecurity risks and intrusions. The charges against the companies, Unisys Corp., Avaya Holdings Corp., Check Point Software Technologies Ltd and Mimecast Limited, all resulted from an investigation of companies “potentially impacted by the compromise of SolarWinds’ Orion software and by other related activity.” (See this PubCo post and this PubCo post.) According to law.com, the SEC “began issuing sweep letters to potential SolarWinds hack victims back in 2021.” The SEC charged that each of these companies learned that the “threat actor” that was probably the cause of the SolarWinds hack had “accessed their systems without authorization, but each negligently minimized its cybersecurity incident in its public disclosures.” In two instances, the companies were alleged to have framed their disclosures as hypothetical or generic risks. Unisys was also charged with a disclosure controls violation. According to Sanjay Wadhwa, Acting Director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement, “[a]s today’s enforcement actions reflect, while public companies may become targets of cyberattacks, it is incumbent upon them to not further victimize their shareholders or other members of the investing public by providing misleading disclosures about the cybersecurity incidents they have encountered….Here, the SEC’s orders find that these companies provided misleading disclosures about the incidents at issue, leaving investors in the dark about the true scope of the incidents.” Jorge G. Tenreiro, Acting Chief of the Crypto Assets and Cyber Unit, cautioned that “[d]ownplaying the extent of a material cybersecurity breach is a bad strategy….In two of these cases, the relevant cybersecurity risk factors were framed hypothetically or generically when the companies knew the warned of risks had already materialized. The federal securities laws prohibit half-truths, and there is no exception for statements in risk-factor disclosures.” The companies were each charged with violations of the Securities Act, the Exchange Act and related rules, and agreed to pay civil penalties ranging from $990,000 (Mimecast) to $4 million (Unisys). Commissioners Hester Peirce and Mark Uyeda dissented, contending that the SEC “needs to start treating companies subject to cyberattacks as victims of a crime, rather than perpetrators of one.”
SCOTUS denies cert. in case regarding agency independence
This PubCo post highlighted a petition for cert. filed this term to review the Fifth Circuit decision, Consumers’ Research v. Consumer Product Safety Commission. Below is a brief update on the outcome. The expectation was that, if the SCOTUS granted cert. in the case, the Court might take the opportunity to continue its shellacking of the administrative state. But would they? The case involved the concept of agency independence as established in a 1935 case, Humphrey’s Executor v. United States—more specifically, the president’s authority to remove commissioners of so-called “independent” agencies, in this instance, the Consumer Product Safety Commission. With the three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit practically begging SCOTUS to review its decision, it sure seemed like a good bet that the Court would grant cert.
SEC charges director with proxy violation for failing to disclose personal relationship bearing on independence
Last week, the SEC announced settled charges against James R. Craigie, a former CEO, Chair and board member of Church & Dwight Co. Inc., an NYSE-listed “manufacturer of consumer-packaged goods,” for “violating proxy disclosure rules by standing for election as an independent director” without advising the board that maybe he really wasn’t quite so independent after all. This omission, the SEC alleged, caused the company’s proxy statements “to contain materially misleading statements.” Maybe you guessed that we’re not talking here about any of the NYSE-enumerated relationships that vitiate independence? No, we’re talking about something closer to the concept of “social independence”—something more amorphous than conventional, stock-exchange-defined independence—that some suggest can be even more compromising at times than the conventional variety. Craigie was alleged to have a “close personal friendship with a high-ranking Church & Dwight executive,” including paying more than $100,000 for the executive and his spouse to join Craigie and his spouse on “six trips that spanned eight countries on five continents.” Because Craigie never disclosed the relationship to the board and encouraged the executive to do the same, the SEC charged, the board was not aware of the relationship and the company’s proxy statements characterized Craigie incorrectly as an independent director. According to the Associate Director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement, “[s]hareholders expect independent directors to exercise autonomous judgment in their decision making, free from undisclosed conflicts….By concealing his relationship with a company executive, Mr. Craigie undermined the board’s director independence process and compromised the company’s disclosures.” Craigie agreed to a five-year officer-and-director bar and to pay a civil penalty of $175,000. The case raises the thorny question of where to draw the line on personal relationships. Is an occasional dinner acceptable? If so, what about a weekend trip? A vacation trip? How many trips is too many? Just how thick do the personal connections have to be to taint independence? Caution seems to be the prescription here.
Last term SCOTUS gave the administrative state quite a thumping. Does it still have the urge to curb? [Updated 10/21 and 11/22]
If you thought that SCOTUS’ decision in Loper Bright last term tolling the bell for the 70-year old Chevron doctrine was the end of SCOTUS’ drubbing of the administrative state, look again—you may well be sorely mistaken. (See this PubCo post.) You might remember that, at a recent Ninth Circuit judicial conference, Justice Elena Kagan, expanding on her dissent in Loper Bright in response to a question, suggested that one reason the Court abandoned stare decisis in the case was plain hubris: in her view, the Court just believed that there was too much agency regulation and thought that the courts needed to step in. (See the Sidebar in this PubCo post.) And perhaps that conclusion didn’t require a giant leap. As far back as 2013 in his dissent in City of Arlington v. FCC (2013), Chief Justice Roberts worried that “the danger posed by the growing power of the administrative state cannot be dismissed.” Is there any reason to think that the urge to curb the administrative state has suddenly abated? Or will we perhaps see a temporary pause while agencies and court watchers catch their breath? As it turns out, there certainly could be opportunities for SCOTUS to continue the onslaught this term. The nondelegation doctrine—which SCOTUS studiously avoided addressing in Jarkesy v. SEC, its looming presence in the lower court decision notwithstanding—has once again reared its head, this time in Consumers’ Research v. FCC out of the Fifth Circuit. A petition for cert has just been filed in that case. And the concept of agency independence as established in a 1935 case, Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, may also be on the chopping block, as SCOTUS considers whether to take up the petition for cert in a Fifth Circuit decision, Consumers’ Research v. Consumer Product Safety Commission, in which the panel practically begged SCOTUS to review the case.
SEC brings securities fraud charges against Cassava Sciences
The SEC announced last week that it had filed a complaint against Cassava Sciences, Inc., a “pharmaceutical company with one primary drug candidate, PTI-125, a potential therapeutic for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease,” for misleading statements about the results of a Phase 2 clinical trial for the potential therapeutic. Also charged in the complaint were the company’s founder and former CEO and its former Senior Vice President of Neuroscience. The complaint highlights and analyzes a number of misleading statements and omissions—an analysis that could be instructive for companies reporting on clinical trial results. In a related Order, the SEC also charged an associate medical professor at the CUNY, who was a consultant and the co-developer of the therapeutic, with manipulating the reported clinical trial results. The company agreed to pay a civil penalty of $40 million. The former CEO and former Senior VP agreed to pay civil penalties of $175,000 and $85,000, respectively, and to officer-and-director bars of three and five years. The consultant agreed to pay a civil penalty of $50,000. They were all charged with violating the antifraud provisions of the federal securities laws; the company was also charged with violating the reporting provisions. It’s been widely reported that, after the announcement of the settlement, the stock price fell by almost 11%. PTI-125 is now reported to be in Phase 3 clinical trials.
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