The Supreme Court has agreed to consider making it tougher for shareholders to bring class-action lawsuits in securities fraud cases.
The decision to hear the case, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. v. Arkansas Teacher Retirement System, came Dec. 11 on appeal from the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals. The respondents are the Arkansas Teacher Retirement System, West Virginia Investment Management Board, and the Plumbers and Pipefitters National Pension Fund.
The court provided no rationale for its decision, which is its custom.
Goldman Sachs has been accused of concealing conflicts of interest in mortgage-backed securities it sold. The firm claims the appeals court made it unduly easy for aggrieved investors to unite in a single lawsuit.
“We’re pleased the Supreme Court has decided to hear our appeal,” a spokesperson for the Wall Street firm said in a Dec. 11 statement.
“This is the most important securities case to come before the Court since Halliburton Co. v. Erica P. John Fund Inc.,” a 2014 Supreme Court ruling, Goldman Sachs argued in its petition to the high court, filed on Aug. 21.
“It presents recurring questions of huge practical significance concerning the presumption of classwide reliance first recognized in Basic Inc. v. Levinson,” a 1988 Supreme Court ruling. This is a presumption “that plaintiffs must invoke for a private securities case to proceed as a class action seeking potentially billions of dollars in damages.”
Goldman contends it was denied justice by the lower court because, in the Halliburton ruling, the Supreme Court “made clear that a defendant must be afforded a meaningful opportunity at the class-certification stage to rebut the Basic presumption, by showing that the alleged misrepresentation had no impact on the price of the relevant security.”
In other words, the 1988 ruling held that judges are allowed to presume investors detrimentally relied on any publicly made misrepresentations when they purchased shares. The same decision also held that defendants can rebut that presumption by demonstrating that the misrepresentations didn’t affect share prices. Goldman claims its assurances about conflicts were so “generic” they couldn’t be responsible for boosting the stock price, according to a Bloomberg summary…
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