State Street Corp. has reached a $60 million settlement on a class-action lawsuit led by the $24 billion Mississippi Public Employees' Retirement System, Jackson, and Union Asset Management Holding AG.
The original suit, filed in December 2009 in U.S. District Court in Boston, was filed on behalf of shareholders regarding the purchases of State Street stock between Oct. 17, 2006, and Oct. 19, 2009, and eventually was combined with other suits into the single class action led by the Mississippi pension fund and Union Asset Management.
The suit alleged the company made false or misleading statements regarding its business, operations and prospects in the three years leading up to a lawsuit announced on Oct. 20, 2009, by the state of California, claiming the firm overcharged the now $300.9 billion California Public Employees' Retirement System, Sacramento, and $184.8 billion California State Teachers' Retirement System, West Sacramento, as its custodian and committed what then-state Attorney General Edmund G. Brown Jr. called “unconscionable fraud.”
California said that State Street entered false exchange rates into its electronic trading databases and reported allegedly false exchange rates in other documents. That lawsuit is still outstanding.
“State Street is pleased to put these matters behind us,” the firm said in an e-mailed statement. “We continue to deny the allegations made in these lawsuits, and believe that they lacked merit. We agreed that the cases should be settled to eliminate the uncertainty, distraction, burden and expense of continued litigation.”
Christopher Moriarty, a lawyer at Motley Rice, the plaintiffs' attorney, did not return a phone call by press time; Pat Robertson, Mississippi PERS executive director, was not available by press time.
