Facebook’s top executives would have paid $ 5 billion under a confidential agreement with the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to protect the company’s founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, from the legal fallout of the Cambridge Analytic scandal. relating to the unauthorized exploitation and sharing of the personal information of users of that social media. This is what emerges from confidential documents published in a lawsuit filed by the Rhode Island Employee Pension Fund (Ersri) in a state court in Delaware. Ersri, one of Facebook’s institutional investors, says the $ 5 billion plea deal has damaged the company financially, and therefore violated Facebook’s fiduciary obligations to the retirement fund and other investors.
From the more than 200 pages of documents it emerges that Zuckerberg, along with chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg and other executives, allegedly agreed to a multibillion-dollar out-of-court settlement with the FTC, an “explicit quid pro quo intended to protect Zuckerberg from direct involvement in the agency and from any personal charges, and even from the obligation of deposition “.
The lawsuit brought by Ersri aims to obtain the admission by the top management of Facebook that he had “acted improperly”, and the payment of compensation. Proof of the financial damage will be difficult, however, since from the confidential agreement with the FTC until its concrete implementation last July, the unit price of Facebook’s shares has increased from 198 to 350 dollars.