Source: http://ny.findacase.com/research/wfrmDocViewer.aspx/xq/fac.19910627_0043662.SCT.htm/qx
Timestamp: 2017-05-28 16:38:13
Document Index: 328461959

Matched Legal Cases: ['§ 78', '§ 14', '§ 14', '§ 14', '§ 10', '§ 109', '§ 14', '§ 14', '§ 14', '§ 14', '§ 14', '§ 14']

| VIRGINIA BANKSHARES v. DORIS I. SANDBERG
VIRGINIA BANKSHARES v. DORIS I. SANDBERG
VIRGINIA BANKSHARES, INC., ET AL., PETITIONERSv.DORIS I. SANDBERG, ET AL.
Souter, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in Part I of which Rehnquist, C. J., and White, Marshall, Blackmun, O'connor, Scalia, and Kennedy, JJ., joined, in Part II of which Rehnquist, C. J., and White, Marshall, Blackmun, O'connor, and Kennedy, JJ., joined, and in Parts III and IV of which Rehnquist, C. J., and White, O'connor, and Scalia, JJ., joined. Scalia, J., filed an opinion concurring in part and concurring in the judgment. Stevens, J., filed an opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part, in which Marshall, J., joined. Kennedy, J., filed an opinion concurring in part and dissenting in part, in which Marshall, Blackmun, and Stevens, JJ., joined.
Section 14(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, 48 Stat. 895, 15 U.S.C. § 78n(a), authorizes the Securities and Exchange Commission to adopt rules for the solicitation of proxies, and prohibits their violation.*fn1 In J. I. Case Co. v. Borak, 377 U.S. 426 (1964), we first recognized an implied private right of action for the breach of § 14(a) as implemented by SEC Rule 14a-9, which prohibits the solicitation of proxies by means of materially false or misleading statements.*fn2
In December 1986, First American Bankshares, Inc., (FABI), a bank holding company, began a "freeze-out" merger, in which the First American Bank of Virginia (Bank) eventually merged into Virginia Bankshares, Inc., (VBI), a wholly owned subsidiary of FABI. VBI owned 85% of the Bank's shares, the remaining 15% being in the hands of some 2,000 minority shareholders. FABI hired the investment banking firm of Keefe, Bruyette & Woods (KBW) to give an opinion on the appropriate price for shares of the minority holders, who would lose their interests in the Bank as a result of the merger. Based on market quotations and unverified information from FABI, KBW gave the Bank's executive committee an opinion that $42 a share would be a fair price for the minority stock. The executive committee approved the merger proposal at that price, and the full board followed suit.
Although Virginia law required only that such a merger proposal be submitted to a vote at a shareholders' meeting, and that the meeting be preceded by circulation of a statement of information to the shareholders, the directors nevertheless solicited proxies for voting on the proposal at the annual meeting set for April 21, 1987.*fn3 In their solicitation, the directors urged the proposal's adoption and stated they had approved the plan because of its opportunity for the minority shareholders to achieve a "high" value, which they elsewhere described as a "fair" price, for their stock.
Although most minority shareholders gave the proxies requested, respondent Sandberg did not, and after approval of the merger she sought damages in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia from VBI, FABI, and the directors of the Bank. She pleaded two counts, one for soliciting proxies in violation of § 14(a) and Rule 14a-9, and the other for breaching fiduciary duties owed to the minority shareholders under state law. Under the first count, Sandberg alleged, among other things, that the directors had not believed that the price offered was high or that the terms of the merger were fair, but had recommended the merger only because they believed they had no alternative if they wished to remain on the board. At trial, Sandberg invoked language from this Court's opinion in Mills v. Electric Auto-Lite Co., 396 U.S. 375, 385 (1970), to obtain an instruction that the jury could find for her without a showing of her own reliance on the alleged misstatements, so long as they were material and the proxy solicitation was an "essential link" in the merger process.
On appeal, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit affirmed the judgments, holding that certain statements in the proxy solicitation were materially misleading for purposes of the Rule, and that respondents could maintain their action even though their votes had not been needed to effectuate the merger. 891 F.2d 1112 (1989).*fn4 We granted certiorari because of the importance of the issues presented. 495 U.S. (1990).
We consider first the actionability per se of statements of reasons, opinion or belief. Because such a statement by definition purports to express what is consciously on the speaker's mind, we interpret the jury verdict as finding that the directors' statements of belief and opinion were made with knowledge that the directors did not hold the beliefs or opinions expressed, and we confine our discussion to statements so made.*fn5 That such statements may be materially significant raises no serious question. The meaning of the materiality requirement for liability under § 14(a) was discussed at some length in TSC Industries, Inc. v. Northway, Inc., 426 U.S. 438 (1976), where we held a fact to be material "if there is a substantial likelihood that a reasonable shareholder would consider it important in deciding how to vote." Id., at 449. We think there is no room to deny that a statement of belief by corporate directors about a recommended course of action, or an explanation of their reasons for recommending it, can take on just that importance. Shareholders know that directors usually have knowledge and expertness far exceeding the normal investor's resources, and the directors' perceived superiority is magnified even further by the common knowledge that state law customarily obliges them to exercise their judgment in the shareholders' interest. Cf. Day v. Avery, 179 U.S. App. D.C. 63, 71, 548 F.2d 1018, 1026 (1976) (action for misrepresentation). Naturally, then, the share owner faced with a proxy request will think it important to know the directors' beliefs about the course they recommend, and their specific reasons for urging the stockholders to embrace it.
But, assuming materiality, the question remains whether statements of reasons, opinions, or beliefs are statements "with respect to . . . material facts" so as to fall within the strictures of the Rule. Petitioners argue that we would invite wasteful litigation of amorphous issues outside the readily provable realm of fact if we were to recognize liability here on proof that the directors did not recommend the merger for the stated reason, and they cite the authority of Blue Chip Stamps v. Manor Drug Stores, 421 U.S. 723 (1975), in urging us to recognize sound policy grounds for placing such statements outside the scope of the Rule.
We agree that Blue Chip Stamps is instructive, as illustrating a line between what is and is not manageable in the litigation of facts, but do not read it as supporting petitioners' position. The issue in Blue Chip Stamps was the scope of the class of plaintiffs entitled to seek relief under an implied private cause of action for violating § 10(b) of the Act, prohibiting manipulation and deception in the purchase or sale of certain securities, contrary to Commission rules. This Court held against expanding the class from actual buyers and sellers to include those who rely on deceptive sales practices by taking no action, either to sell what they own or to buy what they do not. We observed that actual sellers and buyers who sue for compensation must identify a specific number of shares bought or sold in order to calculate and limit any ensuing recovery. Id., at 734. Recognizing liability to merely would-be investors, however, would have exposed the courts to litigation unconstrained by any such anchor in demonstrable fact, resting instead on a plaintiff's "subjective hypothesis" about the number of shares he would have sold or purchased. Id., at 734-735. Hindsight's natural temptation to hypothesize boldness would have magnified the risk of nuisance litigation, which would have been compounded both by the opportunity to prolong discovery, and by the capacity of claims resting on undocumented personal assertion to resist any resolution short of settlement or trial. Such were the premises of policy, added to those of textual analysis and precedent, on which Blue Chip Stamps deflected the threat of vexatious litigation over "many rather hazy issues of historical fact the proof of which depended almost entirely on oral testimony." Id., at 743.
It is no answer to argue, as petitioners do, that the quoted statement on which liability was predicated did not express a reason in dollars and cents, but focused instead on the "indefinite and unverifiable" term, "high" value, much like the similar claim that the merger's terms were "fair" to shareholders.*fn6 The objection ignores the fact that such conclusory terms in a commercial context are reasonably understood to rest on a factual basis that justifies them as accurate, the absence of which renders them misleading. Provable facts either furnish good reasons to make a conclusory commercial judgment, or they count against it, and expressions of such judgments can be uttered with knowledge of truth or falsity just like more definite statements, and defended or attacked through the orthodox evidentiary process that either substantiates their underlying justifications or tends to disprove their existence. In addressing the analogous issue in an action for misrepresentation, the court in Day v. Avery, 179 U.S. App. D.C. 63, 548 F.2d 1018 (1976), for example, held that a statement by the executive committee of a law firm that no partner would be any "worse off" solely because of an impending merger could be found to be a material misrepresentation. Id., at 70-72, 548 F.2d at 1025-1027. Cf. Vulcan Metals Co. v. Simmons Mfg. Co., 248 F. 853, 856 (CA2 1918) (L. Hand, J.) ("An opinion is a fact. . . . When the parties are so situated that the buyer may reasonably rely upon the expression of the seller's opinion, it is no excuse to give a false one"); W. Keeton, D. Dobbs, R. Keeton, & D. Owen, Prosser and Keeton on Law of Torts § 109, pp. 760-762 (5th ed. 1984). In this case, whether $42 was "high," and the proposal "fair" to the minority shareholders depended on whether provable facts about the Bank's assets, and about actual and potential levels of operation, substantiated a value that was above, below, or more or less at the $42 figure, when assessed in accordance with recognized methods of valuation.
This analysis comports with the holding that marked our nearest prior approach to the issue faced here, in TSC Industries, 426 U.S., at 454-55. There, to be sure, we reversed summary judgment for a Borak plaintiff who had sued on a description of proposed compensation for minority shareholders as offering a "substantial premium over current market values." But we held only that on the case's undisputed facts the conclusory adjective "substantial" was not materially misleading as a necessary matter of law, and our remand for trial assumed that such a description could be both materially misleading within the meaning of Rule 14a-9 and actionable under § 14(a). See TSC Industries, supra, at 458-460, 463-464.
Under § 14(a), then, a plaintiff is permitted to prove a specific statement of reason knowingly false or misleadingly incomplete, even when stated in conclusory terms. In reaching this conclusion we have considered statements of reasons of the sort exemplified here, which misstate the speaker's reasons and also mislead about the stated subject matter (e.g., the value of the shares). A statement of belief may be open to objection only in the former respect, however, solely as a misstatement of the psychological fact of the speaker's belief in what he says. In this case, for example, the Court of Appeals alluded to just such limited falsity in observing that "the jury was certainly justified in believing that the directors did not believe a merger at $42 per share was in the minority stockholders' interest but, rather, that they voted as they did for other reasons, e. g., retaining their seats on the board." 891 F.2d, at 1121.
The question arises, then, whether disbelief, or undisclosed belief or motivation, standing alone, should be a sufficient basis to sustain an action under § 14(a), absent proof by the sort of objective evidence described above that the statement also expressly or impliedly asserted something false or misleading about its subject matter. We think that proof of mere disbelief or belief undisclosed should not suffice for liability under § 14(a), and if nothing more had been required or proven in this case we would reverse for that reason.
Petitioners' fall-back position assumes the same relationship between a conclusory judgment and its underlying facts that we described in Part II-B-1, supra. Thus, citing Radol v. Thomas, 534 F. Supp. 1302, 1315, 1316 (SD Ohio 1982), petitioners argue that even if conclusory statements of reason or belief can be actionable under § 14(a), we should confine liability to instances where the proxy material fails to disclose the offending statement's factual basis. There would be no justification for holding the shareholders entitled to judicial relief, that is, when they were given evidence that a stated reason for a proxy recommendation was misleading, and an opportunity to draw that conclusion themselves.
The answer to this argument rests on the difference between a merely misleading statement and one that is materially so. While a misleading statement will not always lose its deceptive edge simply by joinder with others that are true, the true statements may discredit the other one so obviously that the risk of real deception drops to nil. Since liability under § 14(a) must rest not only on deceptiveness but materiality as well (i. e., it has to be significant enough to be important to a reasonable investor deciding how to vote, see TSC Industries, 426 U.S., at 449), petitioners are on perfectly firm ...