Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket 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

Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting 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

Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting 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

Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting According to a January 20, 2007 Wall Street Journal article entitled “Executives Get Bonuses As Firms Reprice Options” (here, subscription required), some of the companies ensnared in the options backdating scandal are paying cash bonuses to executives whose options are being repriced, as the option exercise price is shifted to the actual grant