General Motors and Deloitte & Touche agreed last week to pay a total of $303 million to settle a securities class action settlement alleging that GM made material misstatements in its financials dating back to 2000. Under the agreement, GM will pay $277 million in cash to a class of its shareholders, and Deloitte, GM’s outside auditor, will contribute an additional $26 million in cash.
Lead counsel for plaintiffs were Grant & Eisenhofer and Labaton Sucharow. The firms represented two affiliates of German money manager DekaBank. According to Law.com, although there were U.S. plaintiffs involved, German and Luxembourg institutions had largely been running the case. G&E’s Jay Eisenhofer told Law.com that “[DekaBank] participated in every single mediation session much more actively than an awful lot of U.S. clients that we’ve got…. I think sometimes courts are a little more skeptical of foreign plaintiffs than they are of U.S. plaintiffs, and this case demonstrated that there’s not really any reason for that kind of skepticism.”
GM was reportedly represented by Robert Kopecky of Kirkland & Ellis and Deloitte was represented by Linton Childs of Sidley Austin.
