NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – A second shareholder has filed suit against Affymetrix officials for improperly backdating stock option grants, GenomeWeb News has learned.
The suit, filed Sept. 13 in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, follows a similar but separate suit filed in the same court on Aug. 30, and accuses 12 Affy officials of diverting “hundreds of millions of dollars of corporate assets to themselves via the manipulation of grant dates associated with hundreds of thousands of stock options granted to Affymetrix insiders.”
The suit, filed derivatively by Affymetrix shareholder Samuel Powers, alleges that the backdated option grants enabled the defendants to sell more than $115.3 million worth of Affymetrix stock “at artificially inflated prices” between 1997 and 2006.
An attorney associated with the first shareholder suit confirmed today that the two complaints are separate.
Affymetrix disclosed in early August that it had uncovered “certain documentation lapses” in its stock-option granting practices and would need to restate its financial results dating back to 1997.
The company said that it had completed its financial restatement on Aug. 30.