In Eli Lilly & Co., 2018 BL 7440 (Jan. 8, 2018), Eli Lilly & Company (“Eli Lilly”) asked the staff of the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) to permit the omission of a proposal submitted by William Steiner (“Shareholder”) requesting the board to replace the company’s supermajority voting requirement with a simple majority requirement. The SEC issued the requested no-action letter allowing for the exclusion of the proposal from the 2018 proxy materials under Rule 14a-8(i)(10).
Read MoreIn SEC v. Sayid, No. 17 Civ. 2630 (JFK), 2018 BL 9039 (S.D.N.Y. Jan. 10, 2018), the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York denied securities lawyer Norman T. Reynolds’ (“Reynolds”) motion to dismiss a Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) complaint for failure to state a claim. The SEC alleged Reynolds wrote misleading opinion letters for Mustafa David Sayid (“Sayid”), the legal counsel for Nouveau Holdings Ltd. and Striper Energy, Inc. (collectively, the “Shells”), which opinion letters Sayid used to engage in market manipulation. The court found that the SEC adequately alleged facts that constitute strong circumstantial evidence of Reynolds’ conscious misbehavior.
Read MoreIn Princeton Ophthalmic, LLC v. Corinthian Ophthalmic, Inc., No. 14-cv-05485 (PGS), 2017 BL 364534 (D.N.J. Oct. 10, 2017), the United States District Court for the District of New Jersey denied both Princeton Ophthalmic (“Plaintiff’s”) partial motion for summary judgment as to the first and third elements of section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (“Exchange Act”) and Rule 10(b)(5) promulgated thereunder and Corinthian Ophthalmic, board members Drs. Ianchulev and Packer, and Corinthian CEO Mr. Ballou’s (“Defendant’s”) motion for summary judgment on Plaintiffs entire securities fraud complaint. The court denied the motions on the grounds there were genuine disputes of material facts concerning the Defendants’ misrepresentation of or lack of disclosure of the engineering capabilities of its ocular drug delivery device, the WHISPER.
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