A US jury ruled on Friday that French media giant Vivendi recklessly misled investors about the company’s finances, opening the door to a potential multibillion dollar payout to shareholders.
But former Vivendi chairman and chief executive Jean-Marie Messier was cleared along with his chief financial officer Guillaume Hannezo by the jury, which had been deliberating over two weeks in the shareholder lawsuit.
Vivendi and Messier had been accused of making false statements about company finances between 2000 and 2002, before a collapse of the group’s share price in the lawsuit charging “recklessly misleading communication.”
The class-action lawsuit brought in US federal court in 2002 had sought as much as US$11.5 billion to compensate shareholders.
Lead plaintiff attorney Arthur Abbey said the jury decision could result in a payout of some US$4 billion after shareholder claims are examined.
Other attorneys said the total could be as much as US$9.3 billion.
“This verdict shows that deserving investors can get just compensation through class actions, even against the strongest opposition. Very few of these cases go all the way to trial, and we are gratified at the outcome,” a joint statement from plaintiff attorneys said.
Vivendi said in a statement it “strongly disagrees with the findings” and would appeal.
The company said the amount of damages that Vivendi may be required to pay “remains uncertain and will be known at a later and as yet undetermined stage.”
The verdict calculates damages on a per-share and per-day basis and “it is impossible to know at this time the total number of shares traded by class members, the dates of the relevant sales and the number of class members who will submit a valid claim after receiving notice of the decision,” Vivendi said.
Maxime Delespaul, a lawyer for French plaintiffs, called the decision “a wonderful victory” for shareholders and predicted the ruling would hold up on appeal.
Messier, a high-flying magnate forced out as CEO and chairman of Vivendi in July 2002 as the group was teetering with 35 billion euros (US$47 billion) in debt, was not present when the verdict was read.
The case stems from a huge boom and bust in Vivendi, which went on a massive acquisition spree under Messier’s leadership as it transformed itself from a water utility to a global media giant.
The company changed its name to Vivendi Universal after a complex deal that allowed it to acquire US-based Universal Studios and other properties to refocus the group.
In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs said Vivendi and Messier failed to disclose risks associated with the growth spree that led to big losses and writedowns.
Company attorneys argued that Vivendi, like other firms, saw its share price hammered during the collapse of the tech sector and the economic fallout following the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The lead plaintiffs were the retirement system for Miami Beach municipal employees and several individuals.
GROWING OWINGS: While Luxembourg and China swapped the top three spots, the US continued to be the largest exposure for Taiwan for the 41st consecutive quarter The US remained the largest debtor nation to Taiwan’s banking sector for the 41st consecutive quarter at the end of September, after local banks’ exposure to the US market rose more than 2 percent from three months earlier, the central bank said. Exposure to the US increased to US$198.896 billion, up US$4.026 billion, or 2.07 percent, from US$194.87 billion in the previous quarter, data released by the central bank showed on Friday. Of the increase, about US$1.4 billion came from banks’ investments in securitized products and interbank loans in the US, while another US$2.6 billion stemmed from trust assets, including mutual funds,
Micron Memory Taiwan Co (台灣美光), a subsidiary of US memorychip maker Micron Technology Inc, has been granted a NT$4.7 billion (US$149.5 million) subsidy under the Ministry of Economic Affairs A+ Corporate Innovation and R&D Enhancement program, the ministry said yesterday. The US memorychip maker’s program aims to back the development of high-performance and high-bandwidth memory chips with a total budget of NT$11.75 billion, the ministry said. Aside from the government funding, Micron is to inject the remaining investment of NT$7.06 billion as the company applied to participate the government’s Global Innovation Partnership Program to deepen technology cooperation, a ministry official told the
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s leading advanced chipmaker, officially began volume production of its 2-nanometer chips in the fourth quarter of this year, according to a recent update on the company’s Web site. The low-key announcement confirms that TSMC, the go-to chipmaker for artificial intelligence (AI) hardware providers Nvidia Corp and iPhone maker Apple Inc, met its original roadmap for the next-generation technology. Production is currently centered at Fab 22 in Kaohsiung, utilizing the company’s first-generation nanosheet transistor technology. The new architecture achieves “full-node strides in performance and power consumption,” TSMC said. The company described the 2nm process as
Even as the US is embarked on a bitter rivalry with China over the deployment of artificial intelligence (AI), Chinese technology is quietly making inroads into the US market. Despite considerable geopolitical tensions, Chinese open-source AI models are winning over a growing number of programmers and companies in the US. These are different from the closed generative AI models that have become household names — ChatGPT-maker OpenAI or Google’s Gemini — whose inner workings are fiercely protected. In contrast, “open” models offered by many Chinese rivals, from Alibaba (阿里巴巴) to DeepSeek (深度求索), allow programmers to customize parts of the software to suit their
RSS