You’re most probably familiar with the expression “out of the frying pan into the fire.” Having seemingly settled its e-book price-fixing lawsuit by agreeing to pay $450 million, Tim Cook and other top Apple execs are now being sued by Apple shareholders, claiming that the incident has damaged the company. As per a complaint filed at the end of last week, Cook and other Apple executives were told that they should accept “responsibility for ensnaring Apple in a multi-year anticompetitive scheme.”
Apple shareholders are suing CEO Tim Cook along with some of the company’s other executives and directors, claiming that their role in a price-fixing conspiracy with publishers damaged the company. According to a complaint filed on Thursday in California state court, Cook and other senior Apple figures bear “responsibility for ensnaring Apple in a multi-year anticompetitive scheme” that resulted in a highly-publicized trial and a proposed $450 million payout by the company to settle related complaints that it illegally raised the price of ebooks. The new lawsuit, a so-called “derivative suit,” is a type of corporate litigation that is available to shareholders who believe that a company’s own directors won’t take action to protect it from mismanagement. Such suits, however, have also been described as a form of shakedown in which law firms extract easy payouts from big corporations.
