Court Denies Motion to Dismiss Our Staar Surgical Complaint

ATTORNEY: MICHAEL J. WERNKE
POMERANTZ MONITOR MAY/JUNE 2016

Judge Fitzgerald of the Central District of California recently denied defendants’ motion to dismiss our action involving STAAR Surgical Company. The action alleges that the company, its CEO and its vice president of regulatory affairs violated section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act as well as section 20(a), the “control person” provision.

STAAR is an FDA regulated company that designs, manufactures and sells implantable lenses to correct vision problems. In March of 2014, the company told investors that it believed that it was in compliance with all applicable FDA regulations despite the fact that an FDA inspection of STAAR’s plant was ongoing at the time and the inspector had repeatedly told management that numerous and significant FDA violations had been found. These violations are particularly important to STAAR and its investors because STAAR had a major new lens that was going before the FDA Advisory Panel in mid-March, and these violations would likely delay its approval. The company did not disclose these reports of violations, and investors did not hear about them until the FDA posted them on its website months later. At that point, STAAR’s stock price plunged 17.5%

 Defendants’ main argument for dismissal was that at the time they made their representations of compliance the violation reports were only preliminary and had not been formalized in written notices. The court rejected that argument, holding that because the FDA inspector had repeatedly identified the violations orally to management, defendants would have known that their statements of compliance would mislead investors. The court also held that the company had a duty to disclose the subsequent Warning Letter from the FDA, which stated that the new lens would not be approved by the FDA until the violations were remedied. The court held that, even though the company did not make any further “compliance” representations when it received the Warning Letter, it nevertheless had a duty to correct its prior statement on that subject.

This opinion is significant because it shows that a statement of compliance can be misleading as a result of the FDA inspector orally identifying violations. Prior cases had dealt with the company having receipt of a written notice of violation or Warning Letter.