The families of prisoners will get another shot at seeking damages on their racketeering claim against three companies accused of conspiring to inflate the cost of calls made from U.S. prisons, after the Fourth Circuit ruled Thursday that the claims alleged direct injury to thousands of families as well as the government.
The unanimous published opinion will allow the families to move forward on their Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act claims against Securus Technologies LLC, Global Tel*Link Corp. and 3Cinteractive Corp. after the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland trimmed the complaint to only focus on antitrust violations in September 2021.
The three-judge panel determined that the district court erred when it held that the families’ RICO claim couldn’t establish that they were a “more direct victim” as it was contingent on harm suffered by the contracting governments.
Even though the companies’ alleged conspiracy to charge prisons higher rates for calls happened before it impacted the families, “this doesn’t make the governments more direct victims,” U.S. Circuit Judge Albert Diaz wrote in the opinion.
“As plaintiffs point out, the governments’ injuries could be cured if defendants paid higher site commissions — even if plaintiffs paid the same inflated price,” Judge Diaz said. “So plaintiffs’ injuries aren’t derivative of those suffered by the governments. Rather, plaintiffs and the governments are both direct victims.”
The families launched the proposed class action in June 2020, accusing mobile marketing company 3CI and inmate calling companies Securus and GTL of scheming to hike the price of collect calls from prisons by thwarting the competition.
The scheme impacted thousands of overcharged families, the underlying complaint alleges.
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The plaintiffs are represented by George F. Farah of Handley Farah & Anderson PLLC and Benjamin D. Brown and Robert A. Braun of Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC.
Read 4th Circ. Revives Prison Phone Price-Fixing RICO Claims.
- Investors alleged failure to perform due diligence
- Bayer allegedly lost $12.87 billion in market capitalization
Two pension funds can represent a class of investors in a lawsuit alleging Bayer AG didn’t adequately vet Roundup herbicide maker Monsanto Co. before buying it and didn’t warn them about cancer litigation risks.
The lead plaintiffs cleared a big hurdle with Chief Judge Richard Seeborg‘s May 19 decision to certify a class, since such a ruling typically sets the stage for settlement. Seeborg oversees the case in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.
The stakes are high. Bayer securities lost 26% of their value, and Bayer lost $12.87 billion in market capitalization, as a result of the company’s due diligence failures, the pension funds alleged in the third version of their complaint. Bayer has said it would set aside up to $16 billion to settle tens of thousands of Roundup injury claims if the US Supreme Court rejected its bid for a shield. The Supreme Court rejected that appeal in June 2022.
Bayer said in an emailed statement Monday that it “respectfully disagrees with the Court’s decision to grant class certification and is considering its legal options.”
Carol Gilden, an attorney for the investors, called the ruling carefully reasoned and “a total victory” for her clients. Gilden is with Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC in Chicago.
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Gilden said Seeborg correctly explained that “a securities transaction is domestic when either the buyer or seller incurs irrevocable liability in the United States or title passes here.”
“This is an important holding for investors,” she said in an email Tuesday.
The investors “met this test and established that their transactions took place domestically,” Gilden said. They also showed “that a common methodology exists to establish other class members purchased their Bayer ADRs domestically,” Gilden said.
Seeborg appointed Cohen Milstein as class counsel. Morrison & Foerster LLP and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz represent Bayer.
Read Bayer Investors Get Class Status in Monsanto Deal Risk Suit.
Plaintiffs lawyers at Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann and Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll reached a $1 billion settlement with Wells Fargo & Co. in what’s poised to be one of the 20 largest shareholder settlements of all-time if approved.
First up are lawyers at Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann and Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll, the co-lead counsel in shareholder litigation against Wells Fargo & Co. claiming the bank misled investors about reforms after its 2016 fake accounts scandal. The bank this week agreed to pay $1 billion, which would be one of the 20 largest shareholder settlements of all-time if approved. The deal got preliminary sign-off from U.S. District Judge Gregory Woods in Manhattan within 24 hours of filing. The Bernstein Litowitz team includes Max Berger, who led settlement negotiations, John Browne, Jeroen van Kwawegen, Hannah Ross, Jonathan Uslaner and senior associate Lauren Cruz. The Cohen Milstein team includes Steven Toll, Laura Posner and Molly Bowen.
Read the complete article on Law.com.
The 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act continues to be a bulwark against worker exploitation, but several pillars of the statute and its regulations — from subminimum wages to collective action certification — need refreshing to meet today’s workforce, attorneys said.
Employment law practitioners often bemoan how the FLSA does not jibe well with the contemporary economy. While this is true in some respects, the FLSA still serves its underlying purpose of protecting workers, said D. Michael Hancock, of counsel with worker-side firm Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll PLLC and former assistant administrator for the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division.
“I may be the only one that believes this,” he said, “But I think fundamentally it has continued to serve an important role in this society, in this economy.”
But there are key provisions that need to be tweaked, he said.
Here, Law360 explores four aspects of the FLSA that merit reconsideration and reformulation.
Subminimum Wages
The FLSA permits employers to pay certain categories of workers below the federal minimum wage of $7.25.
One such allowance is the tipped minimum wage, where employers can take a so-called tip credit and pay gratuities-earning workers as little as $2.13 per hour as long as tips carry the worker to the standard federal minimum wage of $7.25.
The tipped credit “has no place in a modern economy,” said Sarah Arendt, a partner with Werman Salas PC.
“It’s ridiculous that employees who make up a large portion of the economy are paid subminimum wages,” she said.
The precarity of low-wage work came into sharp relief amid the pandemic when many such employees were lauded as essential workers.
Hancock said he was struck by how farmworkers were identified as essential workers even though the FLSA excludes agricultural workers from its overtime protections.
Experts say this exclusion is rooted in racism because when Congress enacted the FLSA, lawmakers largely cut out agricultural, domestic and hospitality sectors, fields dominated by Black workers.
“A farmworker can work 60, 70 hours a week doing grueling work, under really harsh conditions, and they’re denied overtime,” he said. “And there’s just no rational reason why.”
Employers can also pay people with cognitive or physical disabilities less than the minimum wage if the employer secures certificates from the U.S. Department of Labor under Section 14(c) of the FLSA.
That is another “gross injustice,” Hancock said.
“We’ve learned enough that we now know that most of the people who are labeled Section 14 workers are very productive, are perfectly capable of doing productive work,” he said. “It’s signaling to them that we value them less and that they’re not as good as others, and I just think it’s morally wrong.”
ExxonMobil has settled a long-running lawsuit brought by villagers who alleged soldiers the oil giant hired to guard a natural gas facility in the Indonesian province of Aceh committed murder and torture.
The two sides agreed to resolve “all matters”, according to a joint filing on Monday.
Agnieszka Fryszman, a lawyer for the villagers, said the terms were confidential.
A spokesperson for Exxon Mobil said the settlement “brings closure for all parties”.
Filed in 2001, the case was brought by 11 villagers in Aceh who alleged they were victims of human rights abuses committed by Indonesian soldiers brought in to guard the oil and gas plant in the city of Lhoksukon between 1999 and 2003. The allegations included sexual assault, battery and unlawful detention.
A trial to decide whether the company was negligent in contracting the Indonesian soldiers had been scheduled to start in Washington, DC on May 24. ExxonMobil had denied being aware of any human rights violations and said the company could not be held responsible for any abuses that did occur as it did not order or authorise them.
The alleged abuses took place at a time when the Indonesian military had deployed thousands of troops in the province to crush a long-running rebellion by pro-independence fighters. A peace agreement came only after the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 killed at least 170,000 people in Aceh, on the northern tip of Sumatra island.
“Our clients … bravely took on one of the largest and most profitable corporations in the world and stuck with the fight for more than 20 years,” said Fryszman, a lawyer at Cohen Milstein.
“We are so pleased that now, on the eve of trial, we were able to secure a measure of justice for them and their families.”
The plaintiffs, who broke down in tears at the settlement, have remained anonymous “in the face of grave threats to themselves and their fellow villagers”, the law firm said in a news release.
A group of shareholders had claimed that the bank misled investors about its progress in cleaning up after a sham accounts scandal a decade ago.
Wells Fargo has agreed to pay $1 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit accusing the bank of overstating how much progress it had made in fixing the unlawful practices that regulators said had hurt millions of customers.
The agreement, detailed in court filings on Monday, is the latest in a succession of settlements and penalties the bank has paid stemming from a fraud scandal that came to light nearly a decade ago. From 2002 to 2016, bank employees, facing unrealistic sales goals imposed by their bosses, opened millions of accounts in customers’ names without their knowledge.
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“If approved, this settlement will help compensate hundreds of thousands of investors — state employees, nurses, teachers, police, firefighters and others — whose critical retirement savings were impacted by Wells Fargo’s fraudulent business practices,” Steven J. Toll, managing partner at Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll, which represented the investors in the suit, said in a statement.
The complete article can be read on The New York Times.
Several pension funds had accused the bank of misleading investors about the extent of its reform efforts after the 2016 fake-accounts scandal
Wells Fargo has agreed to pay $1 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit brought on by shareholders who had accused the lender of overstating the progress of reforms initiated after the 2016 fake-accounts scandal.
The settlement was filed late Monday in federal court in Manhattan, where litigation had been in progress for three years. If it secures the judge’s approval, it would be among the 20 largest securities class-action deals on record, according to plaintiffs.
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The class-action lawsuit was led by pension administrators in Rhode Island and Mississippi, who said their holdings were affected by the bank’s misleading statements.
“The pension fund lost money because of their lies, so we’re holding them accountable,” Rhode Island General Treasurer James Diossa said in an interview Tuesday.
He added that he hoped the settlement would cause the bank to be more careful about future statements to investors.
“I strongly believe that this is an important case historically, too, because it’s going to help shape the next years to come for Wells Fargo and their behavior,” Diossa said.
Laura Posner, an attorney with the law firm Cohen Milstein, which represented the plaintiffs, called the settlement “quite impressive” in terms of what the plaintiffs thought realistic damages were. “More broadly, it is hopefully a way of deterring … other companies from engaging in fraud,” Posner said.
Read Wells Fargo Agrees to $1 Billion Shareholder Settlement.
Eleven Acehnese villagers who admit they or their families experienced horrific violence more than 20 years ago have received financial compensation from ExxonMobil ahead of a human rights trial due to begin later this month.
In a case filed for lawsuit in 2001 in the Washington DC District Court, United States of America, 11 residents of the village accused ExxonMobil of hiring Indonesian soldiers to maintain security in their operational areas.
Residents however accuse the soldiers of abusing their authority and committing horrific abuses against villagers and their families, including murder, torture, sexual violence and kidnapping.
During this period, ExxonMobil reported one of the largest corporate profits in the world.
“Our client, 11 villagers, bravely faced one of the biggest and most profitable companies in the world and kept fighting for more than 20 years. We are very happy that, at the time of going to court, we were able to get justice for them and their families,” said Agnieszka Fryszman, attorney for the plaintiffs and chief advisor to the Human Rights unit, law firm Cohen Milstein.
“We represent the women and children who saw their fathers shot dead, a woman who was forced to repeatedly jump up and down while eight months pregnant and then sexually abused, and men who were detained and electrocuted, burned, and had their backs smeared with knife,” added Agnieszka.
The 11 villagers – whose identities have been kept secret and who are identified as Jane and John Doe – admit to experiencing severe torture including beatings, rape, shooting and causing death (their family members) by Indonesian soldiers hired by the US oil company, in the 1999- 2003 ago.
They are actually ready to go to Washington DC and testify in a United States court in early June in a case called John Doe Vs ExxonMobil. In fact, videos of witnesses to the violence that have been recorded have also been prepared to be heard in court with this jury system.
Their identities remain confidential and the amount of compensation is also not specified for their safety.
Eleven Indonesian villagers from Aceh province have reached a confidential financial settlement with oil giant ExxonMobil.
The villagers have been at the centre of a two-decade long legal battle over alleged human rights abuses.
They say they endured torture, sexual assault, and beatings by Indonesian soldiers contracted by ExxonMobil.
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A trial was scheduled to begin at the end of this month in Washington, DC but has been averted due to the settlement.
The plaintiffs, identified only as Jane and John Doe for their safety, said they were satisfied with the outcome. One of the villagers said that while the victory cannot bring back their loved ones, it represents the justice they fought for over the past two decades.
Agnieszka Fryszman, the lead counsel for the plaintiffs, praised their bravery in taking on one of the world’s largest and most profitable corporations. She expressed satisfaction in securing a measure of justice for the plaintiffs and their families, and highlighted the egregious acts they endured.
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Michel Paradis, a lecturer at Columbia Law School, who was not involved in the case, described the outcome as momentous. “Exxon and its lawyers threw everything they could at them, and they overcame it. That is a testament not simply to their perseverance, but to the justness of their cause.”
“They and their lawyers should take tremendous satisfaction in the fact that they not only succeeded in getting accountability for what was done to them, but that they helped advance a sea change of reform to the way corporations govern themselves that will prevent things like this from happening again.”
Shareholders claimed the bank and its past leadership were moving slower to address regulatory issues than they acknowledged publicly
Wells Fargo agreed to pay shareholders $1 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit that accused the bank of overstating its progress in cleaning up after its 2016 fake-accounts scandal.
The bank’s shareholders alleged Wells Fargo and its past leadership misled them about how swiftly they were fixing the governance issues and risk-management systems that failed to prevent the bank from opening up perhaps millions of phony accounts.
After the 2016 scandal led to a series of regulatory rebukes, the bank moved slower to address the problems than it suggested publicly, the plaintiffs alleged. When the sluggish pace became clear in 2020, the plaintiffs said, stock-price declines cost shareholders, including mutual funds and pension funds.
The preliminary settlement, outlined in a court filing Monday night, still must be approved in the coming months. It would likely be the 17th-largest settlement in a class action brought by shareholders, according to the filing.
“Wells Fargo betrayed the trust of Rhode Island pensioners and now is rightly facing consequences because of that,” James A. Diossa, general treasurer of Rhode Island, whose pension fund is a co-lead plaintiff in the case, said in a statement.
The complete story can be read on The Wall Street Journal (subscription required).