& Securities

The SEC recently announced a settlement with a major publicly traded agricultural company regarding accounting and disclosure fraud, and filed a complaint against one of the Company’s former executives arising from the same conduct. The SEC found that the Company improperly inflated the performance of a key business segment, resulting in materially false and misleading statements in periodic reports, and emphasized that these misstatements had affected metrics of particular interest to the market. The SEC’s actions reflect its continued focus on earnings management; view that market integrity relies on a company’s transparency when making disclosures; and emphasis on individual accountability, quantitative materiality, and cooperation and remediation.

In this client alert, we discuss the SEC’s actions in more detail and provide some key takeaways that this on what this action tells us about the SEC’s current enforcement priorities, and what it means for public companies and their boards and executives.

Please click here to read the alert.