Newpark Resources has announced (here) a $9.85 million settlement of a securities class action lawsuit that, as amended, was based in part on allegations of stock options backdating.
The lawsuit against Newpark Resources and several of its directors and officers arose following the company’s April 17, 2006 press release (here) in
On April 11, 2007, Judge William Alsup of the San Francisco federal court granted the defendants’ motion to dismiss the consolidated shareholders’ derivative complaint filed in the connection with alleged options backdating at CNET Networks, based on plaintiffs’ failure “to plead with particularity that demand on the board was excused as futile.”
The plaintiffs’
As the list of options backdating lawsuits has grown ever longer (refer here), one question has been: where will it all lead? Sooner or later, these cases will all have to be resolved, but so far it has remained unclear what the resolution might look like. A recent settlement in the derivative cases filed
Way back in 2003, long before any of the rest of us had ever heard of options backdating, Micrel sued its former auditor, Deloitte and Touche, alleging that the accounting firm had given the company faulty advice regarding its options grant practices. In its recently filed 2006 10-K (here), Micrel dislosed that
A shareholder of SafeNet has filed a shareholders derivative lawsuit in Delaware Chancery Court, claiming that the SafeNet directors agreed to sell the company to a private equity firm to avoid potential options backdating related liabilities. On March 5, 2007, SafeNet announced (here) that it had agreed to be acquired by Vector
In an earlier post (here), The D & O Diary commented on the research published by Lucian Bebchuk of Harvard Law School and two colleagues, in which they examined over 19,000 options grant awards between 1996 and 2005, finding a disproportionately higher number of grants on the date during the month with the
As the Wall Street Journal noted in its February 16, 2007 article entitled “Probes of Backdating Move to Faster Track” (here, subscription required), the various options backdating investigations may be moving more rapidly now. Within the last weeks, there have been guilty pleas entered in connection with the Take-Two (here) and
The options backdating scandal has engendered a flood of shareholders’ derivative lawsuits (146 as of the last count, here). The D & O Diary has previously questioned (here) plaintiffs’ lawyers’ apparent enthusiasm for these suits given the numerous potential defenses these cases present, including, among others, statute of limitations, demand failure, and
While 144 different companies have been named as nominal defendants in options backdating related derivative lawsuits (see The D & O Diary’s running tally of options backdating related lawsuits here), a new lawsuit filed in federal court in Houston on Thursday will be of particular interest to The D & O Diary’s readers, both
Regular D & O Diary readers know that I have been maintaining a running tally of options backdating related litigation (here). According to the most recent count, so far there have been 23 securities class action lawsuits raising allegations of options grant manipulations. (The Stanford Law School Securities Class Action Clearinghouse maintains its