The financial press is already reporting that many of the nearly 600 SPACs currently searching for merger targets may be unable to find suitable merger targets. Indeed, famous investor Bill Ackerman, unable to find a suitable merger target for his largest-ever SPAC, Pershing Square Tontine Holdings, has already thrown in the towel and liquidated the $4 billion SPAC. With hundreds of SPACs facing the end of their search period in this and the next two quarters, there are likely to be many other SPACs that choose to liquidate in the coming months.
One question I have had about this likelihood is whether or not there is a risk of litigation as SPACs redeem investors’ shares. On the one hand, litigation seemingly should be unlikely as investors are getting their money back. Where’s the harm? On the other hand, in our litigious society, the possibility of litigation always seems to be lurking whenever things don’t work out as planned. While the circumstances involved are very case-specific, a lawsuit filed last week in the Delaware Chancery Court, provides of an example of the kind of end-game squabble that could arise as more SPACs liquidate in the coming months.
Continue Reading SPAC Unable to Find Merger Target Caught Up in Pre-Liquidation Litigation
Several years ago, when it became clear that plaintiffs’ lawyers were going to file merger objection lawsuits in connection with essentially every M&A transaction, the D&O insurers responded by adding a separate, larger retention for M&A-related claims. The larger M&A-related claim retention quickly became pretty much a standard feature of public company D&O insurance policies. However, because the M&A claim retention is in many instances substantially larger than the retention that would otherwise apply, the question of whether the larger retention applies to a particular claim can be a significant one. In a recent case, the Delaware Superior Court addressed a D&O insurance coverage dispute in which, among other things, the insurers and the policyholder disagreed on whether the larger M&A-related claim retention applied to the underlying litigation. In an interesting November 23, 2021 opinion (