Pomerantz Achieves Additional Victories for BP Investors
ATTORNEY: H. ADAM PRUSSIN
POMERANTZ MONITOR, NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2014
BP p.l.c. is a U.K. corporation with substantial U.S. operations. Its common stock trades on the London Stock Exchange (LSE), while its American Depository Shares (ADS) trade on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). In April 2010, the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig chartered to BP exploded and sank, killing 11 people and spilling roughly five million barrels of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico before the blown well was capped.
Since 2012, Pomerantz has been pursuing ground-breaking claims on behalf of nearly three dozen institutional investors to recover losses in both BP securities stemming from allegedly fraudulent pre-spill statements about BP’s safety reforms and post-spill statements about the scope of the spill.
The challenge has been to craft a legal strategy that would permit our clients to pursue claims for their LSE-traded BP shares in U.S. courts, notwithstanding the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Morrison v. Nat’l Australia Bank Ltd., which foreclosed use of the U.S. federal securities laws to pursue claims over foreign-traded securities. Throughout the litigation, BP has sought to get the cases dismissed, for litigation in foreign courts with disadvantageous rules, relying on Morrison and a litany of factual and legal arguments. As the Monitor reported last year, Pomerantz already defeated BP’s motion to dismiss claims brought by our first tranche of clients, three U.S. public pension funds.
This time, in a series of landmark rulings by U.S. District Judge Keith P. Ellison of the Southern District of Texas in October 2014, Pomerantz defeated BP’s motion to dismiss claims brought by our second tranche of clients. Specifically, the court rejected BP’s attempts to: (i) dismiss foreign investors’ lawsuits so as to require them to be litigated abroad; (ii) extend the reach of a U.S. federal law so as to require dismissal of both foreign and domestic investors’ English common law claims, and (iii) shorten the time periods within which a U.S. federal securities claim (for our clients’ ADS losses) could be filed. Each of these cutting-edge victories preserved claims for our clients.
Pomerantz Secures Rights of Foreign Investors to Sue in U.S. Courts
In the most significant October 2014 ruling, Pomerantz has now established the right of foreign investors who purchased foreign-traded shares of a foreign corporation to pursue foreign-law claims for securities fraud losses in a U.S. court. This hard-fought outcome represents the first time after the Supreme Court’s Morrison decision that such claims have been permitted to proceed in a U.S. court.
A year ago, Pomerantz defeated BP’s motion to dismiss similar claims by U.S.-based pension funds, when Judge Ellison held that their claims had sufficient ties to the U.S. to warrant adjudication here – rather than in England – even after he decided to apply English common law. At that time, facing only U.S. plaintiffs, he also did not credit BP’s arguments that Morrison or the U.S. Constitution prohibited such an outcome as impermissible regulation of foreign commerce.
This time, BP, once again invoking the Morrison holding, sought to dismiss the cases of Pomerantz’s foreign clients under the same forum non conveniens doctrine, so that they would have to litigate their cases in English courts. Given the English system’s restrictions on contingent fee litigation and its imposition of a “loser pays” approach on legal fees, this argument posed a serious threat to the viability of our clients’ cases. BP’s argument, boiled down, was that because these clients were “foreign,” their cases necessarily had a stronger nexus to England – even though many of our “foreign” clients hailed from nations outside the U.K. (and indeed outside of Europe).
After extensive briefing, Pomerantz Partner Matthew Tuccillo argued against dismissal in a multi-hour hearing in July 2014. He successfully argued that Pomerantz’s foreign clients deserved the same deference on their choice of forum as our U.S. clients. Drawing upon extensive advance due diligence that he and Pomerantz Associate Jessica Dell had conducted with the outside investment management firms that serviced our clients, Mr. Tuccillo then persuaded Judge Ellison that our foreign plaintiffs’ cases had considerable ties to the U.S., such that BP had not met its burden to disrupt their forum choice.
Pomerantz Defeats BP’s Attempt To Extend SLUSA Dismissal to Foreign Law Claims
BP also argued that the Securities Litigation Uniform Standards Act (or “SLUSA”), which in certain instances requires dismissal of securities claims brought under U.S. state law, should be extended to apply to foreign-law claims. Under BP’s interpretation, SLUSA would have mandated dismissal of the English common law claims of all of Pomerantz’s foreign clients and U.S. non-public clients.
Here, Pomerantz forcefully argued that the Exchange Act of 1934 expressly defined the “State” law claims to which SLUSA applies as those brought under the laws of “any State of the United States, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, or any other possession of the United States.” As Mr. Tuccillo argued to Judge Ellison in July, “Defendants ask this Court to do nothing less than to rewrite, selectively, an unambiguous statute that was duly elected by Congress to suit their purposes, and the Court should decline to do so.” Judge Ellison agreed.
Judge Ellison also rejected BP’s argument that the original pleading of Texas law claims (later amended to be English law claims) and/or the use of Texas choice of law rules to identify English law as the governing substantive law served to trigger SLUSA’s dismissal provisions. In doing so, he validated our read of the existing split in the national case law on SLUSA’s application.
These rulings were significant, as they preserved the lawsuits of dozens of BP plaintiffs, including both foreign and domestic institutions represented by Pomerantz and other firms.
Pomerantz Establishes a Broader Time Period for Exchange Act Claims
The court also ruled in Pomerantz’s favor as regards the U.S. federal securities claims being pursued by some of our foreign and domestic clients who purchased BP’s ADS on the NYSE. Normally, the pendency of a class action will serve to toll the applicable statute of limitations for individual plaintiffs who may later pursue the same claim. Here, a parallel class action has sought to pursue, on a class-wide basis, a claim under Section 10(b) of the Exchange Act for losses in BP’s NYSE-traded ADS (although, notably, the court has more recently failed to certify most of the proposed class).
BP had argued that Pomerantz’s clients waived this tolling by filing their individual lawsuits prior to the adverse decision on class certification in the class action. BP also argued that in any event, the statute of repose for our clients’ Exchange Act Claims, which is normally intended to be the “outside” date by which a claim must be filed, was never tolled. These arguments, if credited, would have served to bar as untimely our clients’ Exchange Act claims.
Judge Ellison sided with us on both arguments, thereby preserving tolling of both the statute of limitations and the statute of repose. The repose ruling in particular was significant, because there is a deep divide in the case law nationally, and the Supreme Court had been poised to hear the issue this term (before the case raising it was settled). These rulings permit our clients to continue to file Exchange Act claims regarding their BP ADS losses, a very valuable right in the wake of Judge Ellison’s decisions denying class certification for most of the time period at issue in the parallel class action.
The Path Ahead
Together, these landmark rulings have highlighted a new path toward recovery in U.S. courts for foreign investors pursuing foreign law claims regarding their losses in foreign-traded securities. Ever since Morrison was decided in 2010, no other case like this has survived.
Pomerantz serves on a court-appointed Steering Committee overseeing all individual actions against BP by institutional investors and serves as the sole liaison with the court and BP. Our third tranche of plaintiffs’ cases is already on file, and discovery is anticipated to commence in all cases in the near future.
Pomerantz currently represents nearly three dozen institutional plaintiffs in the BP litigation, including U.S. public and private pension funds, U.S. limited partner-ships and ERISA trusts, and pension funds from Canada, the U.K., France, the Netherlands, and Australia. The BP litigation is overseen by Partners Marc Gross, Jeremy Lieberman, and Matthew Tuccillo.