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SAP CLASS ACTION SETTLED
And the winner is …. The lawyers. That’s the way I read SAP’s announcement of the terms of the preliminary settlement of a class action suit over its purchase of Sybase last year. That purchase drew the typical litany of plaintiffs claiming the purchaser underpaid and that the disclosures about the process were inadequate. The only money scheduled to change hands is the $1,075,000 million in fees and expenses for the plaintiff’s attorneys.
The judge still has to approve this deal, but there doesn’t appear to be anything of substance that the plaintiffs themselves get as the proposal doesn’t affect the amount they received for their stock. SAP paid $5.8 billion or $65 per share for Sybase. According to the official description of the settlement, the plaintiffs and their attorneys were satisfied with various additional disclosures that SAP made after the suits were filed. These disclosures included three sets of analyses made by Merrill Lynch, the background of events and negotiations leading up to SAPs offer and the consideration of the merge by the Sybase directors along with other potential strategic alternatives they explored. There were others but it boiled down to the plaintiffs got information and I assume SAP feels it’s getting off cheap and the plaintiffs must have felt the case wasn’t that strong. Somehow, I don’t think that what people who sue have in mind is getting a bunch of documents released. “Hooray, I got more disclosures.”
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