Robbins Geller’s Suit Is Tossed After Its Insider Source Disavows Claims
Perkins Coie got some surprising news when a purported confidential source supporting a securities class action showed up unannounced at its offices in November.
Perkins was representing the defendant, Boeing Co., in a suit claiming shareholder losses because of the delayed 787 Dreamliner, the Chicago Tribune reports. The law firm had subpoenaed Bishnujee Singh after he was identified as the source supporting allegations that Boeing had hidden the results of a failed wing stress test on the plane. The source dropped off some documents at the law firm on Nov. 1 and told lawyer Steve Koh that investigators for the plaintiffs firm had demanded that he admit to seeing documents he had never seen.
Koh asked Singh to return the next day, and he obliged. Singh’s deposition led to dismissal of the class action, filed by Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd. Singh said he hadn’t seen the allegations attributed to him until he met with defense counsel and he had no personal knowledge of the testing documents, according to the opinion dismissing the suit by U.S. District Judge Suzanne Conlon of Chicago. Nor had he met with the plaintiffs lawyers, he said. Nor was he employed directly by Boeing; he actually worked there as a contract employee.
“The cast of characters is worthy of a contemporary novel,” Conlon writes at the beginning of her opinion. “The court must decide whether we have reached the final chapter.” She goes on to close the book on the case, dismissing the suit with prejudice. The plaintiffs claims, she said, are “at best unreliable and at worst fraudulent, whether it is Singh or plaintiffs’ investigators who are lying.”
Robbins Geller claims Singh was lying when he spoke to the law firm and was telling the truth when he spoke to its investigators, according to the Tribune account.
