New York City has now sued Activision and the target is its CEO Bobby Kotick.
The new lawsuit was filed in Delaware on April 26, 2022 by New York City Employees’ Retirement System and pension funds for the city’s teachers, police and firefighters according to Steven Totilo from Axios. It alleged that Kotick actually rushed to secure a takeover bid from Microsoft, which he used to escape liability for misconduct at the company.
The lawsuit is an action in Delaware’s Court of Chancery. This will now allow the stockholders to pressure the companies to be more transparent. The companies will need to open all of their books to expose the corruption, issues, toxic culture, or anything that can cause negativity in the offices.
New York City is now demanding Activision to give them a lot of documents that will include material that is related to the Microsoft deal, board memos, details on the five possible buyers that were mentioned in Activision’s official description of the sale talks, and more.
It was also revealed that New York City has been pressing Activision to reveal internal documents since fall. The original purpose was to discover what Kotick knew about the sexual harassment at the company.
NYC wanted to see Activision’s documents as a pretext to sue Kotick and the board members for allegedly costing the company value. Even though he was already criticized by the public, he still rushed the deal of Activision getting acquired by Microsoft in late 2021.
The lawsuit states that Kotick was deemed unfit to negotiate that the sale of Activision to Microsoft, but it still went through. The board knew about this but they still let him do it.
Totilo shared the long list of lawsuits and investigations that had happened last summer. Check it out:
- 1 federal harassment suit (settled, though facing appeals)
- 1 discrimination suit from California
- 1 purported class action suit
- 4 shareholder lawsuits (consolidated to two)
- 8 lawsuits over the Microsoft merger (four voluntarily dismissed)
- 2 “220 complaints,” including the one from NYC
- Plus: An SEC investigation and insider trading inquiries from the SEC and Department of Justice