A federal court gave its final approval Tuesday to a $167.5 million settlement between EQT Corp. and its shareholders, closing out a class action that claimed the company overstated the operational benefits of its $6.7 billion merger with Rice Energy in 2017.
U.S. District Judge Robert Colville signed off on the deal, noting that there had been no objections and only 10 opt-outs after the settlement administrator notified 121,654 potential shareholder class members.
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The plaintiffs’ counsel called the settlement fund “the largest securities class action recovery ever in the history of the Western District of Pennsylvania and the 14th largest in the history of the Third Circuit.”
“We are pleased that this hard-fought litigation has reached settlement,” S. Douglas Bunch of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC, co-lead counsel for the shareholders, said in a statement Wednesday. “It is a favorable result for investors as it provides an immediate cash recovery and resolves further litigation.”
The settlement covers individual and institutional shareholders who had purchased EQT stock between June 2017 and June 2019, held stock in EQT or Rice as of September 2017 and voted in either company’s November 2017 special shareholder meetings, and/or got shares of EQT stock in exchange for their Rice stock as part of the companies’ merger.
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The class is represented by Steven J. Toll, Daniel S. Sommers, S. Douglas Bunch, Christina D. Saler, Benjamin F. Jackson and Alexandra Gray of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC, Salvatore J. Graziano, Adam H. Wierzbowski, Jesse L. Jensen and Robert Kravetz of Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann LLP, and Michael A. Comber of Comber Miller LLC.
Summary by Bloomberg AI
- New York pension plans and other investors have called on the SEC to reverse a policy that lets companies push shareholders’ fraud claims into arbitration.
- The SEC’s action permits companies to insert clauses in their registration statements to force investors into arbitration instead of litigation to resolve securities fraud claims.
- Investor attorneys have slammed the move, saying “forced arbitration creates costly, uncertain, and inefficient proceedings that benefit no one” according to Michael D. Scott.
New York pension plans and other big investors have called on the SEC to reverse a new policy that lets companies push shareholders’ fraud claims into arbitration instead of litigation.
The Securities and Exchange Commission in September limited shareholders’ longstanding court access for a “costly, unproven, and unwieldy system of private arbitration,” New York city and state pension plans said in a Nov. 3 letter to SEC Chairman Paul Atkins. Chicago Teachers’ Pension Fund, Denver Employees Retirement Plan, and dozens of other institutional investors and advocates joined them in the letter.
The SEC’s action permits companies to insert clauses in their registration statements to force investors into arbitration instead of litigation to resolve securities fraud claims. The new policy isn’t binding on companies, but could “influence issuer behavior,” according to the Republican-led agency.
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“Forced arbitration creates costly, uncertain, and inefficient proceedings that benefit no one—not participants, not plan sponsors, and ultimately not the companies themselves,” Michael D. Scott, executive director of the National Coordinating Committee for Multiemployer Plans, said in a statement to Bloomberg Law on Wednesday. The pension plan advocate was among the signatories.
Investors claimed Bayer deceived investors about the merits of its $63 billion merger with Monsanto, given the unending litigation over Monsanto’s weed killer Roundup.
A federal judge granted final approval to a $38 million class action settlement in a case against Bayer over shareholders’ claims the German pharmaceutical giant didn’t conduct adequate due diligence before making a multibillion-dollar deal to acquire Monsanto.
Shareholders sued Bayer in 2020, claiming the company misled them about the litigation risk of purchasing the agrochemical company, whose signature weed killer product Roundup was found to have caused people to develop cancer in three bellwether jury trials.
Plaintiffs argued that Bayer forged ahead with the Monsanto acquisition while downplaying the litigation risk to investors and representing that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, is non-carcinogenic.
The $63 billion deal was struck in 2016 but was not made final until June 2018. Two months later, a San Francisco jury found Monsanto liable for $250 million in punitive damages in the case brought by a school groundskeeper with non-Hodgkin lymphoma.
By then, plaintiffs say, Monsanto had racked up thousands of additional personal injury lawsuits, and Bayer’s post-merger American depositary receipts plunged significantly.
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Carol Gilden of Cohen Milstein, an attorney for the plaintiffs, told Courthouse News she was pleased with the settlement, describing the case as a “hard-fought dispute.”
“This was an important securities class action that re-affirms ADR investor rights and the long arm of Uncle Sam to hold foreign companies accountable to U.S. securities laws,” she said.
The Fall 2025 issue of the Shareholder Advocate, our quarterly securities litigation and investor protection newsletter, featuring:
- Laura Posner and Christina Schiciano on the SEC’s endorsement of forced arbitration provisions in IPOs
- Richard Lorant on the proposal to ease companies’ financial reporting requirements
- S. Douglas Bunch on investors’ preliminarily approved settlement with EQT
- Jay Chaudhuri on the Trump and Biden Administrations’ differing approaches to regulating investment advisors’ AI use
Bayer AG shareholders have asked a California federal judge to give final approval of its $38 million settlement with the German multinational to end claims it downplayed litigation risks related to the weedkiller Roundup, saying the deal, which seeks over $10 million in attorney fees, is fair.
A hearing for the motions is set for Oct. 30. The parties notified the court that they had reached a settlement in the case in February, and the deal was preliminarily approved in June, according to the suit’s docket.
U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg said the deal appeared to be “fair, reasonable and adequate” when initially approving the deal in June.
In a motion requesting 27% of the settlement fund in attorney fees, lead counsel said the nearly $10.3 million payment would represent “a reasonable and justifiable upward adjustment from the 25% benchmark” used in the Ninth Circuit. Among other things, the attorneys noted they had dedicated nearly 15,000 hours of professional time to the case.
The attorneys also called their request for almost $3.3 million in expenses “reasonable both in scope and magnitude.”
If granted final approval, the settlement would put an end to five years of litigation.
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The investors are represented by Carol V. Gilden, Steven J. Toll, Christopher Lometti and Benjamin F. Jackson of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC and Nicole Lavallee and Alexander S. Vahdat of Berman Tabacco.
Former shareholders in utility said Big Four firm failed to spot red flags and allowed management to hide mounting issues
Deloitte has agreed to pay $34mn to investors who blamed the auditor for losses stemming from the collapse of one of the country’s largest nuclear power projects, a rare legal settlement by a Big Four firm.
Former shareholders in the South Carolina utility Scana said Deloitte failed to spot red flags and allowed management to hide mounting problems with the construction of two nuclear reactors a decade ago.
Scana shares tumbled when it eventually abandoned work on the reactors in 2017, leading to its cut-price sale to a rival utility and jail time for its former chief executive, who pleaded guilty to misleading regulators. The fiasco also pushed construction company Westinghouse into bankruptcy.
Lawyers for Scana shareholders claimed Deloitte should pay a portion of losses estimated at $800mn, because the firm repeatedly signed off on financial statements in which Scana indicated the project would be finished on time.
A judge will need to approve the settlement, which was filed in South Carolina federal court on Friday, but plaintiff lawyers called it an “excellent result” for shareholders. It comes on top of a $192.5mn settlement from Scana and its officers in 2020.
“The $34 million recovery from Deloitte is one of the largest securities class action settlements against an auditing firm in the last decade,” the lawyers wrote.
“The settlement was also reached after extensive litigation, at a time when the parties were fully aware of the strengths and weaknesses of their respective positions, and was the culmination of extensive arm’s length negotiations overseen by a well-respected mediator.”
Investors face a high legal bar for implicating auditors in the securities frauds of their clients, as audits are meant to provide only “reasonable assurance” that financial statements are free of error. In the largest recent settlement, PwC paid$65mn in 2015 over claims related to the collapse of the brokerage MF Global.
The Saranac Lake Central School has announced the 2025 Distinguished Alumni Awards. This year’s recipients are Suzanne Dugan and Richard Meyer. There will be a dinner to honor them on Nov. 8 at the Hotel Saranac. The dinner will also feature a silent auction to benefit the community schools initiative.
Suzanne Dugan was born in Saranac Lake to Kathy and Bill Dugan. She is the youngest of five siblings and attended Saranac Lake public schools from kindergarten through 12th grade. Graduating in 1982, Dugan went on to attend Siena College, from which she graduated magna cum laude. She earned her J.D. cum laude from Albany Law School of Union University in 1989.
Dugan began her career as a judicial clerk with the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court. She joined the firm of Cohen Milstein in 2011 after more than 20 years of service in government, including as special counsel for ethics for the Office of the New York State Comptroller where she created and oversaw a vigorous and dynamic ethics program for 2,500 employees and provided advice and counsel to the state comptroller, acting as the sole trustee of the third largest public pension plan in the country. She also previously served as counsel and acting executive director of the New York State Ethics Commission.
Dugan currently serves as special counsel to Cohen Milstein, where she leads the firm’s ethics and fiduciary counseling practice, which she helped found. She serves as fiduciary counsel for public pension plans from coast to coast, including some of the largest institutional investors in the country, and provides guidance on fiduciary responsibility, ethical duties, strategic governance and compliance issues. She consults with governmental entities and other clients on design and implementation of comprehensive ethics programs and provides fiduciary and ethics training to boards of trustees of pension plans and government entities. She assists in conducting investigations and structuring recommendations, providing an additional layer of oversight and accountability. Dugan also serves as an outside ethics officer to municipalities across the country, evaluating and investigating complaints of unethical conduct, providing objective and independent guidance, and working to ensure a culture of ethical leadership.
Dugan is the president of the National Association of Public Pension Attorneys. She is also a member of the Board of the Clifton-Park-Halfmoon Public Library for which she has dedicated over a decade of service.
Two settlements can move forward in a suit brought by workers at red meat processing plants who alleged that Agri Beef Co., Indiana Packers Corp. and Washington Beef LLC engaged in a conspiracy to suppress wages, a Colorado federal judge ruled, finding the deals totaling $2.5 million are fair.
In an order Thursday, U.S. District Judge Philip A. Brimmer preliminarily approved a $1.4 million settlement with Agri Beef and Washington Beef and a $1.1 million settlement with Indiana Packers.
The deals bring the total of settlements the workers snagged to around $200 million as part of their 2022 suit alleging that beginning in 2014, the nation’s leading red meat processors — companies that produce nearly 80% of the country’s red meat — hired two consulting companies in an attempt to suppress workers’ pay in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.
New Jersey’s attorney general slapped Amazon with a suit Wednesday claiming the online retail giant makes it nearly impossible for pregnant or disabled employees to get workplace accommodations, putting workers on unpaid leave if they seek adjustments such as lifting limits or extra breaks.
The state’s complaint alleged that Amazon.com Services LLC has systemically failed to provide accommodations to pregnant workers and those with disabilities across dozens of package-sorting warehouses it operates in the state in violation of the New Jersey Law Against Discrimination and the state’s Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.
“The largest company in the world, a company that can deliver anything to your door in hours, is doing everything it can to avoid providing basic protections to the people who make those packages get to you on time,” New Jersey Attorney General Matthew J. Platkin said in a Wednesday news conference announcing the suit.
The suit claimed that Amazon, which is New Jersey’s largest private employer, implements “arduous and ineffective” accommodation policies and procedures that are designed to prevent workers from securing work adjustments. When workers filed accommodation requests — seeking more bathroom breaks, lifting restrictions or other adjustments — the state said Amazon would often automatically place the employee on unpaid leave while their request was pending, a practice prohibited by the NJLAD.
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The state is represented by Christina Brandt-Young, Farng-Yi Foo and Maryanne Abdelmesih of the New Jersey attorney general’s office and Christina D. Saler, Diane Kee, Emmy L. Levens, Harini Srinivasan and Phoebe Wolfe of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC.
A Third Circuit ruling that the Fair Labor Standards Act’s collective action opt-in mechanism is silent about the release of unasserted claims by opt-out class action members will make it easier to settle cases containing claims under both federal and state wage and hour laws, attorneys said.
Thursday’s panel ruling in Graham Lundeen v. 10 West Ferry Street Operations LLC, a conditionally certified collective action and proposed class action alleging tipped wages violations, addressed whether a settlement can release the claims of not only FLSA opt-in collective members but also opt-out state law class members. The panel departed from a lower court by finding that the FLSA doesn’t necessarily restrict settlement of opt-out members’ claims.
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Rebecca Ojserkis of worker-side firm Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC said the ruling embraces hybrid actions involving parallel federal and state law claims.
“The ruling boils down to the idea that workers can bring parallel FLSA and state wage and hour law claims, and they can settle them both at the same time,” she said.
Generally, had the Third Circuit panel reached the opposite conclusion, an “employer would not be getting final closure,” she said.
“My guess is their willingness to settle or the amounts for which they might settle might look very different if they weren’t getting a global release,” she said. “A contrary decision might have discouraged filing hybrid actions.”
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Ojserkis also said settlement approval still isn’t guaranteed, but in this particular case, it is likely.
The Third Circuit’s direction, she said, is “not quite a blank check” to the district court.