Court Opinion

ID: 9962865
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2024-04-23 21:01:17.588974+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T08:19:55.301737
License: Public Domain

In the

    United States Court of Appeals
                 For the Seventh Circuit
                     ____________________
No. 23-1073
APPVION, INC. RETIREMENT SAVINGS AND EMPLOYEE STOCK
OWNERSHIP PLAN, by and through GRANT LYON in his capacity
as the ESOP Administrative Committee of Appvion, Inc.,
                                        Plaintiff-Appellant,

                                 v.

DOUGLAS P. BUTH, et al.,
                                               Defendants-Appellees.
                     ____________________

         Appeal from the United States District Court for the
                   Eastern District of Wisconsin
         No. 1:18-cv-01861 — William C. Griesbach, Judge.
                     ____________________

    ARGUED DECEMBER 1, 2023 — DECIDED APRIL 23, 2024
                ____________________

   Before WOOD, ST. EVE, and LEE, Circuit Judges.
   WOOD, Circuit Judge. Appvion, Inc., is a Wisconsin-based
paper company. In the 1990s, Appvion was owned by French
conglomerate Arjo Wiggins Appleton. For many years, Ap-
pvion struggled to stabilize its ﬁnancial footing, but this
proved to be diﬃcult. Unable to ﬁnd a suitable buyer as of late
2000, Arjo decided to explore a sale to Appvion’s employees.
2                                                       No. 23-1073

That sale would take the form of an “employee stock owner-
ship plan,” or ESOP, and would be ﬁnanced by the employ-
ees’ retirement savings. That is the path Appvion took, but
ultimately it was not enough to save the company, which de-
clared bankruptcy in 2017. The bankruptcy court authorized
Grant Lyon to act on behalf of the Plan. After conducting an
internal investigation, Lyon raised an avalanche of claims
against dozens of individuals and corporations. His central
theory is that the defendants fraudulently inﬂated the price of
Appvion in 2001 and that the price remained inﬂated until
Appvion’s bankruptcy.
    All the defendants ﬁled motions to dismiss, and the dis-
trict court granted almost all the relief they sought. We com-
mend the court for its careful review of this complex matter.
We ﬁnd no error in many of its rulings, but we conclude that
reversal is necessary for a subset of the counts based on the
Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA). We there-
fore remand for further proceedings.
                         I.      Background
    Because this case comes to us at the motion-to-dismiss
stage, we accept all well-pleaded facts in Lyon’s complaint as
true and draw all reasonable inferences in his favor. Hernan-
dez v. Illinois Institute of Tech., 63 F.4th 661, 666 (7th Cir. 2023).
                              A. The Plan
   Appvion (formerly known as Appleton Papers) is a com-
pany specializing in two types of paper, both rather dated in
today’s digital age: carbonless paper, which transfers infor-
mation written on a top sheet to sheets beneath it, and thermal
paper, now used mostly for receipts and lottery tickets. Arjo
began trying to sell Appvion in 1998, but it struggled to ﬁnd
No. 23-1073                                                    3

a buyer on the open market. It then oﬀered a contingent fee of
up to $10 million to Appvion’s oﬃcers, including its then-
CEO Douglas Buth, if they managed to sell Appvion for over
$700 million. Buth thought that he could meet that goal
through a sale of Appvion to its employees, and Arjo gave
him a green light to move forward.
     Buth hired investment banking ﬁrm Houlihan Lokey to
organize the sale, agreeing to pay Houlihan 1% of the ﬁnal
sale price if the deal closed. Houlihan in turn engaged State
Street Bank and Trust Company to be the trustee of the em-
ployees’ ownership interest in Appvion. Houlihan also hired
Willamette Management Associates to appraise Appvion for
purposes of the sale; Willamette determined that Appvion
was worth $810 million. Houlihan then issued an opinion
ﬁnding that to be a fair price for Appvion, despite the fact that
its fee was contingent on closing and even though an Appvion
newsletter had warned that no ﬁrm with a contingent fee was
qualiﬁed to issue a fairness opinion.
    State Street and Appvion’s oﬃcers began trying to con-
vince Appvion’s employees to accept the deal at that price,
relying in part on Houlihan’s fairness opinion. In a series of
road shows and letters to the employees, they repeatedly de-
scribed Houlihan as an independent advisor, never mention-
ing Houlihan’s contingent fee. Appvion’s oﬃcers also pre-
sented the employees with a prospectus outlining the deal.
The prospectus disclosed the oﬃcers’ contingent fees, but
again failed to disclose Houlihan’s fee even as it touted Houli-
han’s fairness opinion.
   In November 2001, the employees voted in favor of buying
Appvion, and the deal closed. It was structured as a sale to a
newly formed corporation, Paperweight Development
4                                                 No. 23-1073

Company. The employees contributed $107 million from their
retirement accounts to buy 100% of Paperweight’s stock; Pa-
perweight used that money, plus over $700 million in loans,
to buy 100% of Appvion’s stock for its appraised value of $810
million. Thus, Paperweight became the sole owner of Ap-
pvion and was in turn fully owned by Appvion’s employees.
(There was little practical diﬀerence between Paperweight
and Appvion: their ﬁnances were consolidated and they had
identical Boards. For simplicity, we refer to Appvion except
where the distinction is relevant.) Houlihan received its
$8.1 million fee, while Buth, general counsel Paul Karch, and
two other Appvion oﬃcers also received fees totaling around
$4 million for helping the sale go through.
    After the sale was ﬁnalized, Appvion formed the Em-
ployee Stock Ownership Plan Administrative Committee
(“the ESOP Committee”). The ESOP Committee, whose mem-
bers were Board-appointed oﬃcers of Appvion, was the
named ﬁduciary of the Plan. It was responsible for the Plan
participants’ purchases of Appvion stock going forward. It
also was in charge of selecting a trustee to hold the Plan par-
ticipants’ shares of Appvion. Over the next 16 years, the ESOP
Committee retained three trustees: State Street, from 2001 to
2013; Reliance Trust Company, from 2013 to 2014; and Argent
Trust Company, from 2014 to 2017.
   To facilitate sales and purchases of Appvion shares by the
employees, the trustees recalculated the fair market value of
Appvion twice a year. The Plan’s documents required the
trustees to hire an independent appraiser to help with that
task. State Street initially retained Willamette as Appvion’s
appraiser. In 2004, however, the Willamette employees who
had worked on the Appvion account left to become managing
No. 23-1073                                                    5

directors at the investment-banking ﬁrm Stout Risius Ross.
The trustees moved their business over to Stout, which con-
tinued Willamette’s valuation practices.
    Each valuation proceeded as follows: The appraiser calcu-
lated the fair market value of Appvion, based in part on ﬁnan-
cial projections provided by Appvion’s directors and oﬃcers
and in part on Appvion’s assets and liabilities. The appraiser
gave that valuation to the trustee, which used it to set the new
price of a share of Appvion. The ESOP Committee then re-
viewed and approved the price set by the trustee, reported it
to the Plan participants, and used it to approve purchases and
sales of Appvion’s shares. The price varied over time, starting
at $10 per share in the 2001 sale, reaching a high of $33.62 by
the end of 2006, and gradually falling to a low of $6.85 in 2016.
    Four relevant events took place between the 2001 sale and
Appvion’s bankruptcy in 2017. First, shortly after the sale,
State Street ceded to Appvion’s CEO most of the trustee’s
power over nominating and removing directors of Appvion.
Second, Appvion’s Board adopted various incentive plans
that awarded bonuses to the directors and oﬃcers. These bo-
nuses initially rewarded increases in Appvion’s price from
one valuation to the next. But after the stock price began de-
clining, the Board switched to incentive programs that were
calculated solely on the basis of Appvion’s share price, mean-
ing that the directors and oﬃcers reaped bonuses even if Ap-
pvion’s value had fallen since the last valuation. Third, in
2003, Appvion bought BemroseBooth, an English ticketing
company, for $63.5 million. The transaction was a ﬂop: by
2007 Appvion’s ﬁnancial statements disclosed that, after oﬀ-
setting BemroseBooth’s assets by its unfunded pension debt,
BemroseBooth was worth $0. And fourth, the directors and
6                                                  No. 23-1073

oﬃcers repeatedly tried and failed to sell Appvion. The clos-
est they came was in early 2012, but the deal soon fell through.
    As noted, Appvion declared bankruptcy in 2017. In con-
nection with that bankruptcy, Lyon became the sole member
of the ESOP Committee, replacing Appvion’s oﬃcers. The
bankruptcy court authorized Lyon to bring claims on behalf
of the Plan. Upon reviewing Appvion’s internal documents,
Lyon discovered that in the 2001 sale and for every valuation
thereafter, Willamette (and then Stout) had adopted appraisal
methods that, in Lyon’s view, fraudulently inﬂated the price
of Appvion’s shares. Three of these methods are particularly
important. First, the appraisers did not question the insiders’
ﬁnancial projections when using them to calculate Appvion’s
enterprise value, even though year after year those projections
proved overly optimistic. Second, the appraisers added a con-
trol premium to Appvion’s enterprise value—at ﬁrst 15% of
Appvion’s calculated value, and later 10%—to account for the
Plan’s control of Appvion, even though the Plan participants
had very little power over the Board’s members or its deci-
sions. And third, when oﬀsetting Appvion’s enterprise value
by its liabilities, the appraisers excluded substantial portions
of Appvion’s debt, particularly its unfunded pension debt.
Had they included those debts as liabilities, Lyon alleges, the
Plan’s equity in Appvion would have been worth much less—
as little as $0 for most of the relevant years.
                      B. Procedural History
   Lyon ﬁled a First Amended Complaint (FAC) against
Houlihan, the Plan’s three trustees, its two independent ap-
praisers, various individuals associated with those corporate
defendants, and the directors and oﬃcers and their spouses.
Spanning more than 200 pages, the FAC charged a total of 59
No. 23-1073                                                     7

named defendants with violations of ERISA, federal securities
law, and various state laws.
    The district court dismissed the FAC in its entirety, with-
out prejudice, pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure
12(b)(6). It held that the pre-2012 ERISA claims were barred
by ERISA’s statute of repose and that the post-2012 ERISA
claims were improperly group-pleaded and lacked particu-
larity. It also held that the federal securities claims failed for
lack of scienter. The court dismissed the state-law theories as
preempted by ERISA and, as to the claims against Houlihan,
also for failure to state a claim.
    Lyon took advantage of his opportunity to replead and
ﬁled a prolix Second Amended Complaint (SAC), which
drops some of the FAC’s defendants and adds some new
ones. The SAC is around 400 pages, and it responds to the dis-
trict court’s demand for individualized allegations about each
defendant’s role in the alleged fraud. In total, it raises 37 the-
ories for recovery, against everyone in sight: the directors and
oﬃcers, Houlihan, the Plan’s three trustees (State Street, Reli-
ance, and Argent), and the Plan’s second independent ap-
praiser (Stout). The district court referred the SAC to a mag-
istrate judge, who determined that Lyon had not ﬁxed most
of the problems the district court had identiﬁed in the FAC.
The magistrate judge recommended that the court again dis-
miss all counts except two ERISA theories against Argent, the
Plan’s most recent trustee.
   The district court adopted the report almost in its entirety,
dismissing with prejudice all but those two counts. Lyon
moved for entry of ﬁnal judgment on the dismissed claims,
and the district court obliged with a judgment under Federal
Rule of Civil Procedure 54(b). That order lay the foundation
8                                                  No. 23-1073

for the present appeal, even as Lyon continues to pursue the
claims against Argent in district court.
    On appeal, Lyon has abandoned his prohibited-transac-
tions theories against the trustees (SAC Counts 22–23) and his
ERISA arguments against Houlihan (SAC Counts 36–37 and
part of SAC Count 21). He is appealing the dismissal of the
following parts of the case: (1) all of his ERISA claims against
the directors and oﬃcers and most of his ERISA claims
against State Street and Reliance; (2) his federal securities-
fraud claims against Reliance, nine of the directors and oﬃc-
ers, and Stout and two of Stout’s managing directors; and
(3) his state-law theories against the directors and oﬃcers,
Stout, and Houlihan. We take up the arguments in that order,
considering each of those rulings de novo. Chaidez v. Ford Motor
Co., 937 F.3d 998, 1004 (7th Cir. 2019).
                          II.    ERISA
    ERISA is a “comprehensive statute designed to promote
the interests of employees and their beneﬁciaries in employee
beneﬁt plans.” Shaw v. Delta Air Lines, Inc., 463 U.S. 85, 90
(1983). The statute does not require an employer to provide a
beneﬁt plan, but if an employer chooses to do so, ERISA im-
poses “various uniform standards, including rules concerning
reporting, disclosure, and ﬁduciary responsibility,” on that
employer. Id. at 91. Most of Lyon’s claims arise under ERISA,
based on the relationship between the directors, oﬃcers, and
trustees (as ﬁduciaries) and the Plan participants (as beneﬁ-
ciaries).
                       A. Pre-2012 Claims
    ERISA contains a statute of repose, which reﬂects “a legis-
lative judgment that a defendant should be free from liability
No. 23-1073                                                    9

after the legislatively determined period of time.” California
Public Employees’ Retirement System v. ANZ Securities, Inc., 582
U.S. 497, 505 (2017) (“CalPERS”) (quoting CTS Corp. v. Wald-
burger, 573 U.S. 1, 9 (2017)). The relevant part of the statute
provides that:
   No action may be commenced under this subchapter
   with respect to a ﬁduciary’s breach of any responsibil-
   ity, duty, or obligation under this part, or with respect
   to a violation of this part, after the earlier of—
   (1) six years after (A) the date of the last action which
   constituted a part of the breach or violation, or (B) in
   the case of an omission, the latest date on which the
   ﬁduciary could have cured the breach or violation.
29 U.S.C. § 1113.
    Lyon ﬁled his ﬁrst complaint on November 26, 2018. Sec-
tion 1113(1) therefore normally would bar liability for any ac-
tions or omissions prior to November 26, 2012. But there is an
exception to the statute of repose, which states that “in the
case of fraud or concealment, [an] action may be commenced
not later than six years after the date of discovery of such
breach or violation.” Id. If Lyon can show fraud or conceal-
ment, that exception saves his ERISA claims, because he ﬁled
suit fewer than six years after discovering the breaches.
   In Radiology Center, S.C. v. Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., we held
that ERISA’s use of the phrase “fraud or concealment” adopts
the fraudulent-concealment doctrine. 919 F.2d 1216, 1221 (7th
Cir. 1990). That doctrine refers to “steps taken by wrongdoing
ﬁduciaries to cover their tracks”—that is, it focuses on “steps
taken by the defendant to hide the fact of the breach rather
than … the underlying nature of plaintiﬀs’ claim.” Id. at 1220.
10                                                    No. 23-1073

Under Radiology Center, Lyon must allege more than just the
underlying fraud to get the beneﬁt of the fraud-or-conceal-
ment exception.
     Lyon points to language in some of our cases that he ar-
gues opens the door to “self-concealing frauds.” He is correct
that, after Radiology Center, we acknowledged that fraud and
concealment is not “limited to active concealment that is sep-
arate from the underlying wrongdoing”; it “can include gen-
uine acts of concealment committed in the course of the un-
derlying wrong.” Martin v. Consultants & Administrators, 966
F.2d 1078, 1095 (7th Cir. 1992). We were careful to note, how-
ever, that “fraud claims do not receive the beneﬁt of ERISA’s
six-year statute of limitations simply because they are fraud
claims.” Id. The plaintiﬀ must allege “actual concealment—
i.e., ‘some trick or contrivance intended to exclude suspicion
and prevent inquiry.’” Id. (quoting Wood v. Carpenter, 101 U.S.
135, 143 (1879)); see also id. at 1103 (Posner, J., concurring). In
Martin, for example, we found fraudulent concealment when
the defendant channeled the proceeds of a fraudulent kick-
back scheme through dummy corporations. The kickback
scheme was the underlying fraud; the use of dummy corpo-
rations, though “occur[ing] in the course of the fraud itself ra-
ther than independently of it,” was an additional step of con-
cealment taken separately from the fraud. Id. at 1095.
    We therefore must ask whether Lyon alleges some trick or
contrivance separate from the underlying fraud. For the 2001
sale, Lyon’s underlying fraud allegation is that the defendants
misrepresented the fair market value of Appvion to trick the
would-be Plan participants into buying shares at an inflated
price. Conflicted by their contingent fees, Houlihan and Ap-
pvion’s officers conspired with State Street and Willamette to
No. 23-1073                                                   11

exclude Appvion’s substantial pension debt from
Willamette’s valuations of Appvion and to add a phony con-
trol premium to the equation. Houlihan represented to the
employees that Willamette’s valuation was fair, and it con-
vinced them to believe that representation. Buth and Karch
falsely claimed that Houlihan was independent and did not
disclose its conflict of interest. For the post-2001 misconduct,
Lyon’s underlying allegation is that the directors, officers, and
trustees continued the fraud by having Willamette (and later
Stout) biannually issue inflated valuations of Appvion, which
the trustees then used (with approval from the ESOP Com-
mittee) to set fraudulently high prices for future stock pur-
chases by the employees.
    The problem for Lyon is that these allegations of fraud are
the same as his allegations of fraudulent concealment. Lyon
argues that the defendants concealed their fraud in the 2001
sale through their misleading representations that Houlihan
was independent. These are the same representations making
up his fraud claim for that sale. And to show concealment
from 2001 to 2012, Lyon points to the defendants’ continued
approval of inflated prices for Appvion, the identical actions
constituting the underlying fraud.
     Lyon pushes back on that conclusion, but the only exam-
ple to which he points is the filing of regulatory forms. These
filings, including 10-Qs and 10-Ks filed with the Securities
and Exchange Commission and Form 5500s filed with the De-
partment of Labor, are mandatory forms in which the defend-
ants reported the appraised price of Appvion shares. Lyon in
essence argues that the defendants concealed their fraud by
not reporting Appvion’s real value in those filings. But the
doctrine of fraudulent concealment requires “positive acts,”
12                                                  No. 23-1073

not “[c]oncealment by mere silence.” Wood, 101 U.S. at 143;
see generally Macquarie Infrastructure Corp. v. Moab Partners,
L.P., No. 22-1165, 2024 WL 1588706 (S. Ct. Apr. 12, 2024) (pure
omissions are insufficient to show a violation of SEC Rule 10b-
5, which prohibits fraud). Lyon’s approach would make the
exception to ERISA’s statute of repose apply whenever the de-
fendants failed to come clean about their fraud. ERISA re-
quires more. See Wolin v. Smith Barney Inc., 83 F.3d 847, 851
(7th Cir. 1996).
    Because Lyon failed to allege a trick or contrivance sepa-
rate from the fraud, his ERISA claims are time-barred to the
extent they seek recovery for misconduct before November
26, 2012. The district court therefore correctly dismissed
Lyon’s breach-of-duty claims against the directors and oﬃc-
ers who left Appvion before 2012 (SAC Counts 4–7, 11, and
19); his prohibited-transaction claim related to the 2001 sale of
Appvion (SAC Count 21); and the portions of the remaining
ERISA counts that relate to pre-2012 conduct (SAC Counts 1,
3, 8–10, 12–18, and 25–28).
                      B. Post-2012 Conduct
    The statute of repose does not end our ERISA inquiry, be-
cause some of the alleged misconduct occurred after Novem-
ber 26, 2012. Lyon asserts that the directors, oﬃcers, and trus-
tees continued to accept fraudulent valuations and to approve
purchases at inﬂated prices until Appvion’s bankruptcy. He
puts those allegations into three buckets: breach of duty, pro-
hibited transactions, and co-ﬁduciary liability. The district
court allowed the breach-of-duty and prohibited-transaction
claims against Argent to go forward, holding that they could
be read to allege imprudence rather than fraud. (Recall that
Argent entered the picture in 2014, when it bought Reliance’s
No. 23-1073                                                    13

ESOP business and assumed the Appvion account.) The court
dismissed the rest of the claims. We reverse the dismissal of
the post-2012 ERISA claims.
                        1. Breach of Duty
   We first take up the breach-of-duty theories, which re-
quire proof of three elements: that the defendants were plan
fiduciaries, that they breached a fiduciary duty, and that their
breach resulted in harm to the Plan. Kenseth v. Dean Health
Plan, Inc., 610 F.3d 452, 464 (7th Cir. 2010). All agree that Lyon
adequately pleaded harm; if the defendants misled the em-
ployees into overpaying for Appvion’s stock, they harmed the
Plan. He also needed, however, plausibly to allege that the
defendants bore some responsibility for that harm.
    The directors and officers first contend that the complaint
fails to point to anything indicating that they were acting as
fiduciaries in approving Stout’s valuations. A person is an
ERISA fiduciary “to the extent” that she “exercises any discre-
tionary authority or discretionary control respecting manage-
ment of such plan” or “has any discretionary authority or dis-
cretionary responsibility in the administration of such plan.”
29 U.S.C. § 1002(21)(A). It is not enough to allege merely that
a defendant is a fiduciary; the defendant must have been “act-
ing as a fiduciary … when taking the action subject to com-
plaint.” Pegram v. Herdrich, 530 U.S. 211, 226 (2000).
    Lyon clears that hurdle with ease. His complaint alleges
that, through their role in the ESOP Committee, the officers
reviewed and approved the valuations. The complaint even
lists specific edits the ESOP Committee requested at several
meetings with Stout’s valuation team, including adjustments
to the appraised price. The outside directors on Appvion’s
14                                                    No. 23-1073

Board were not as directly involved in the valuation process
as the officers. Nonetheless, the complaint alleges that they
met with the independent appraisers twice a year, reviewed
the valuations at Board meetings, and could appoint or re-
move members of the ESOP Committee if they were dissatis-
fied with the committee’s work on the valuations. Those are
not “clerical, mechanical, ministerial” functions, Pohl v. Nat’l
Benefits Consultants, Inc., 956 F.2d 126, 129 (7th Cir. 1992); they
are discretionary acts at the core of the directors’ and officers’
responsibilities as ERISA fiduciaries.
    That leaves the harder question: does the complaint con-
tain enough to put the breach question in play? ERISA lays
out the duties of fiduciaries in 29 U.S.C. § 1104(a)(1). As rele-
vant here, a fiduciary must act for the exclusive purpose of
benefiting the plan’s participants (the duty of loyalty), 29
U.S.C. § 1104(a)(1)(A), and “with the care, skill, prudence, and
diligence” of a prudent fiduciary (the duty of prudence), 29
U.S.C. § 1104(a)(1)(B). These duties are “the highest known to
the law.” Halperin v. Richards, 7 F.4th 534, 546 (7th Cir. 2021)
(quoting Donovan v. Bierwirth, 680 F.2d 263, 272 n.8 (2d Cir.
1982)).
    Two rules of pleading are relevant to this analysis. The ﬁrst
is Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 8(a)(2), which requires a
pleader to provide “a short and plain statement of the claim
showing that the pleader is entitled to relief.” As the Supreme
Court did in Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544 (2007),
we focus here on the ﬁnal clause of that rule: the need to allege
“enough facts to state a claim to relief that is plausible on its
face,” id. at 570, meaning facts that “raise a right to relief above
the speculative level,” id. at 555.
No. 23-1073                                                   15

    The second rule is Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 9(b),
which requires that for allegations of fraud or mistake, the
pleader must “state with particularity the circumstances con-
stituting fraud or mistake.” This supplants the usual “short
and plain statement” requirement of Rule 8. The idea is that
because even unfounded accusations of fraud can cause seri-
ous harm, a plaintiﬀ must “have some basis” for those accu-
sations before making them. Uni*Quality, Inc. v. Infotronx, Inc.,
974 F.2d 918, 924 (7th Cir. 1992). Rule 9(b) stands as a barrier
against such “strike suits” by requiring plaintiﬀs to identify
the precise contours of the fraud. Vicom, Inc. v. Harbridge Mer-
chant Services, Inc., 20 F.3d 771, 777 (7th Cir. 1994).
    The district court dismissed all of Lyon’s breach-of-duty
claims. But its reasons for doing so do not hold up under ex-
amination. The magistrate judge had determined that Lyon
had premised his claims against the directors and oﬃcers,
State Street, and Reliance entirely on fraud, and that those
claims therefore were subject to the “heightened pleading
standard” found in Rule 9(b). The magistrate judge then rec-
ommended dismissing those claims for failing to meet that
standard. In footnote six, however, the magistrate judge said
that he “believe[s] any singular [sic] defendant has adequate
notice of the allegations against themselves to satisfy the
Twombly pleading standard.” The district court adopted the
recommendation as to all claims, but it refused to endorse
footnote six, without specifying which standard it thought
was applicable: Rule 9(b) or Twombly. We are thus unsure on
what ground the district court dismissed the breach-of-duty
arguments. We see three possible explanations for the district
court’s ruling, but we have problems with each one.
16                                                No. 23-1073

    First, if the court dismissed the claims because it thought
Lyon failed to plead intent with particularity, it misread Rule
9(b). That rule requires plaintiﬀs to plead with particularity
the “who, what, when, where, and how” of the fraud. DiLeo
v. Ernst & Young, 901 F.2d 624, 627 (7th Cir. 1990). Notably
absent from that list is the word “why.” That is because Rule
9(b) explicitly excludes from its heightened pleading standard
allegations of “[m]alice, intent, knowledge, and other condi-
tions of a person’s mind,” stating that they “may be alleged
generally.” (Emphasis added.) In the portion of the recom-
mendation that the district court adopted, the magistrate
judge determined that “[t]he biggest hole in Lyon’s theory”
was his failure to explain why all the defendants, many of
whom had “nothing to gain and everything to lose,” would
conspire to commit fraud. This reasoning reads the exclusion
of intent out of Rule 9(b).
    Using the claim against CEO Kevin Gilligan (SAC Count
13) as a representative example, we can see that Lyon pleaded
with particularity the “who, what, when, where, and how” of
the fraud:
      Who: Kevin Gilligan, CEO of Appvion from Au-
      gust 2015 to October 2017. SAC at ¶ 950.
      What: Adopting inﬂated prices for Appvion’s
      stock. Id. at ¶ 951–53.
      When: On July 11, 2016; January 18, 2017; and
      July 17, 2017. Id. at ¶ 952.
      Where: At the ESOP Committee’s meetings. Id.
      How: Providing faulty projections to Stout and
      moving to approve Stout’s resulting valuations,
No. 23-1073                                                     17

       then communicating the approved price to the
       Plan participants. Id. at ¶ 952–53.
The SAC therefore pleads “the identity of the person making
the misrepresentation, the time, place, and content of the mis-
representation, and the method by which the misrepresenta-
tion was communicated to the plaintiﬀ.” U.S. ex rel. Hanna v.
City of Chicago, 834 F.3d 775, 779 (7th Cir. 2016) (quoting U.S.
ex rel. Grenadyor v. Ukrainian Vill. Pharmacy, Inc., 772 F.3d 1102,
1106 (7th Cir. 2014)). That is all Rule 9(b) requires.
    Second, if the court dismissed these contentions because it
thought Lyon failed to plead some other element of his claim
with particularity, it was too quick to conclude that any such
failure automatically warranted dismissal of those claims.
Rule 8 allows plaintiﬀs to “plead statements of a claim … al-
ternatively or hypothetically,” FED. R. CIV. P. 8(d)(2), and
when “both fraudulent and nonfraudulent conduct violating
the same statute or common law doctrine is alleged, only the
ﬁrst allegation can be dismissed under Rule 9(b),” Kennedy v.
Venrock Associates, 348 F.3d 584, 493 (7th Cir. 2003). Thus, if a
court thinks a plaintiﬀ has failed to plead fraud, it must “dis-
regard averments of fraud not meeting Rule 9(b)’s standard
and then ask whether a claim has been stated.” Lone Star La-
dies Inv. Club v. Schlotzsky’s, Inc., 238 F.3d 363, 368 (5th Cir.
2001). The district court correctly followed this rule as to
Lyon’s claims against Argent, holding that those claims could
be read as alleging imprudence rather than fraud. It held,
however, that the claims against the directors and oﬃcers
were “entirely premised on their knowing and self-motivated
participation in fraud” and that “[t]here is no other way to
read the allegations against” them. (Emphasis in original).
18                                                  No. 23-1073

    We do not read the complaint that narrowly. It is true that
Lyon’s pre-2012 allegations, particularly as they relate to the
2001 sale of Appvion, rest entirely on a theory of fraud, but
his post-2012 allegations are not so limited. For example,
Count 28 of the SAC asserts that Board member Mark Suwyn
knowingly allowed the ESOP Committee to approve inﬂated
valuations so that his compensation would increase. That al-
legation, a charge that Suwyn breached his duty of loyalty,
sounds in fraud. Were we to excise the allegation for failure to
meet Rule 9(b), however, Count 28 would survive as a claim
for breach of the duty of prudence. It says that “[i]f Suwyn
claims he did not know about these, and other, valuation ir-
regularities and the related ESOP Committee and ESOP Trus-
tee failures described herein, then he is admitting to a com-
plete lack of prudence and loyalty for not knowing these
basic, yet hugely material facts.” SAC at ¶ 1042. That “if-then”
structure is the type of hypothetical pleading envisioned by
Rule 8(d)(2). See Charles A. Wright & Arthur R. Miller, 5 Fed.
Practice and Procedure § 1282 (4th ed. 2023). And Lyon’s hypo-
thetical pleading—that the defendants failed to carry out their
duties in a prudent way—comfortably qualiﬁes as a violation
of the duty of prudence under 29 U.S.C. § 1104(a)(1)(B). The
same is true of the claims against the trustees; were we to ex-
cise the fraud allegations against them, imprudence claims
would remain. See, e.g., SAC at ¶ 591 (“In sum, Reliance failed
to prudently investigate the value of PDC’s stock and there-
fore breached its duty of prudence and loyalty under
ERISA.”).
    Third, if the district court dismissed the claims for lack of
plausibility, it raised the bar too high. Parts of the district
court’s opinion indicate that it saw Rule 9(b) as imposing not
just a heightened particularity standard, but a heightened
No. 23-1073                                                    19

plausibility standard as well. But Rule 9(b) does no such thing.
All it does is call for more than a “short and plain statement”
of the claim; it leaves the requirement of plausibility un-
touched. See Loreley Financing No. 3 Ltd. v. Wells Fargo Securi-
ties, LLC, 797 F.3d 160, 174 (2d Cir. 2015) (“While Rule 9(b)
requires that the circumstances constituting fraud be stated
with particularity, it does not require factual pleadings that
demonstrate the probability of wrongdoing.” (cleaned up)).
The Court acknowledged as much in Twombly; it dismissed
the claims not because “the allegations in the complaint were
insuﬃciently ‘particularized’” but because they were implau-
sible, and it noted that its decision does not “broaden the
scope of” Rule 9(b). 550 U.S. at 569 n.14. (In this respect, as we
note below, ERISA and securities claims diﬀer markedly; the
latter must indeed satisfy a higher likelihood standard.)
    Applying Twombly, we ﬁnd that Lyon adequately pleaded
breach of the duty of loyalty by State Street, Reliance, and the
ten post-2012 directors and oﬃcers. Lyon alleged that the di-
rectors and oﬃcers had an incentive artiﬁcially to raise Ap-
pvion’s price so that they would beneﬁt from increased bo-
nuses. They accomplished this goal by providing Stout with
exaggerated projections and conspiring with it to exclude
pension debt and to add a fraudulent control premium. Lyon
alleged that State Street and Reliance had an incentive to keep
the directors and oﬃcers happy in order to retain Appvion’s
business, and so they looked the other way and accepted val-
uations they knew to be inﬂated. Perhaps Lyon will have trou-
ble proving those allegations, but this case comes to us on a
motion to dismiss, and “the plausibility standard does not al-
low a court to question or otherwise disregard nonconclusory
factual allegations simply because they seem unlikely.” Fire-
stone Financial Corp. v. Meyer, 796 F.3d 822, 827 (7th Cir. 2015);
20                                                   No. 23-1073

see also Swanson v. Citibank N.A., 614 F.3d 400, 404 (7th Cir.
2010) (“‘Plausibility’ in this context does not imply that the
district court should decide whose version to believe, or
which version is more likely than not.”).
    Even if the fraud aspects of Lyon’s claim were implausible,
Lyon has stated claims for breach of the duty of prudence. He
pleaded that to the extent the directors, oﬃcers, and trustees
did not intentionally inﬂate Appvion’s price, they were care-
less in failing to scrutinize Stout’s valuation methods.
    We acknowledge at the outset that the fact that Appvion
eventually failed is not proof of imprudence, Albert v. Oshkosh
Corp., 47 F.4th 570, 579 (7th Cir. 2022), and that “rel[ying] on
a ﬁnancial advisor is evidence of prudence,” Fish v. GreatBanc
Trust Co., 749 F.3d 671, 681 (7th Cir. 2014). But hiring an expert
is not a complete shield against an imprudence claim. ERISA’s
duty of prudence requires ﬁduciaries to “investigate the ex-
pert’s qualiﬁcations, provide the expert with complete and ac-
curate information, and make certain that reliance on the ex-
pert’s advice is reasonably justiﬁed under the circumstances.”
Keach v. U.S. Trust Co., 419 F.3d 626, 636–37 (7th Cir. 2005) (in-
ternal quotation marks omitted) (quoting Howard v. Shay, 100
F.3d 1484, 1489 (9th Cir. 1996)). This duty “will necessarily be
context speciﬁc.” Fifth Third Bancorp v. Dudenhoeﬀer, 573 U.S.
409, 425 (2014). A prudent ﬁduciary would more closely scru-
tinize an expert’s advice if red ﬂags indicated that the expert’s
methods might be unsound.
    Lyon makes several allegations that, taken as true, indicate
that a prudent ﬁduciary would have questioned Stout’s valu-
ations. The most troubling allegation is that Stout used a con-
trol premium in appraising the price of a share of Appvion.
From 2012 to 2014, Stout added a 10% control premium to the
No. 23-1073                                                            21

company’s enterprise value to account for the Plan’s control-
ling interest. The control premium had an outsized eﬀect on
Appvion’s appraised value. For example, in the December
2014 valuation, the control premium accounted for roughly
61% of the appraised value of the Plan’s equity in Appvion.
That translated directly into much higher share prices for Plan
participants. Yet these price increases were not justiﬁed by ac-
tual control. State Street had long ago ceded to Appvion’s
CEO most of the Plan participants’ power over the composi-
tion of Appvion’s Board, and the Plan participants were al-
lowed to vote only on extraordinary actions by the Board
(such as a sale of the company). For all other matters, the trus-
tee was required to vote the Plan’s shares as directed by the
ESOP Committee.
    The control premium alone might be enough to support
further proceedings in this case. But it did not stand alone:
Lyon added several other allegations of imprudence to the
mix. For instance, he asserted that the directors and oﬃcers
consistently gave Stout overly rosy projections that caused
Stout to overestimate Appvion’s future earnings. He also al-
leged that Appvion’s leadership repeatedly tried and failed to
sell Appvion, suggesting that the market did not agree with
Stout’s valuations. Further, when Stout included Bemrose-
Booth’s pension debt in calculating its fair market value, that
value shot down to zero—indicating that the directors, oﬃc-
ers, and trustees should have ensured that Stout was account-
ing for Appvion’s own, much larger pension debt. 1

    1 Because the defendants’ actions related to BemroseBooth took place

outside of the repose period, Lyon cannot seek recovery for those actions.
22                                                      No. 23-1073

    We assume that, taken separately, any or all of these addi-
tional red ﬂags would not have been enough to put the de-
fendants on alert. But our job is to read the complaint as a
whole, not to parse it “piece by piece to determine whether
each allegation, in isolation, is plausible.” Braden v. Wal-Mart
Stores, Inc., 588 F.3d 585, 594 (8th Cir. 2009). Taking all of
Lyon’s allegations together (with emphasis on the control pre-
mium), we conclude that the complaint plausibly pleads that
the directors, oﬃcers, and trustees breached their duty of pru-
dence by failing to ensure that Stout’s methods were sound.
Compare Howard, 100 F.3d at 1490 (ﬁnding a breach of a duty
when the defendant failed to “make an honest, objective eﬀort
to read the valuation, understand it, and question the meth-
ods and assumptions that do not make sense”), with Keach,
419 F.3d at 637 (ﬁnding no breach of duty when the defend-
ants, “rather than blindly accept[ing]” the ﬁnancial projec-
tions of the company’s oﬃcers, “challenged a number of as-
sumptions in [the appraiser’s] evaluation before developing
their own independent evaluation”).
    Our ﬁnding of plausibility ﬁnds support in a recent—and
quite similar—case from the Fourth Circuit. In Brundle v. Wil-
mington Trust, N.A., 919 F.3d 763 (4th Cir. 2019), an ESOP par-
ticipant alleged that the trustee breached its ﬁduciary duties
by allowing the ESOP to overpay for the sponsor company’s
shares. After a multi-day bench trial, the district court found
in the participant’s favor. The trustee appealed, arguing in
part that it justiﬁably relied on the valuation it received from
an independent appraiser—none other than Stout Risius
Ross. The Fourth Circuit aﬃrmed. Of particular relevance

That does not prevent him, however, from pointing to BemroseBooth as a
red flag that the defendants should have been aware of after 2012.
No. 23-1073                                                     23

here, the court noted that Stout had included a 10% control
premium in its calculations even though the ESOP lacked “the
power to appoint a majority of the [company’s] board, a key
indicator of control.” Id. at 777. The court also faulted the trus-
tee for failing to probe irregularities in the projections that the
company’s management provided to Stout. The Fourth Cir-
cuit concluded that the trustee therefore should have been
aware of possible ﬂaws in Stout’s methodology. Granted, the
Brundle plaintiﬀ also pointed to other red ﬂags that Lyon does
not allege, such as that “at least one [trustee] oﬃcial knew of”
a prior, much lower valuation of the company by another in-
dependent appraiser. Id. at 774. But that should come as no
surprise; unlike the Brundle plaintiﬀ, Lyon has yet to engage
in discovery. As this litigation progresses, Lyon might (or
might not) ﬁnd further indications of the defendants’ fraud or
imprudence.
     We ﬁnd the Fourth Circuit’s reasoning persuasive. It rein-
forces our conclusion that Lyon has “present[ed] a story that
holds together.” Swanson, 614 F.3d at 404. We naturally take
no position on any future developments in the case. Lyon will
still have to show that the defendants fraudulently or impru-
dently misrepresented Appvion’s value. See Twombly, 550
U.S. at 556 (“[A] well-pleaded complaint may proceed even if
it strikes a savvy judge that actual proof of those facts is im-
probable, and ‘that a recovery is very remote and unlikely.’”
(quoting Scheuer v. Rhodes, 416 U.S. 232, 326 (1974))). And, of
course, the defendants will have the opportunity to prove that
they acted prudently and in good faith, including by intro-
ducing evidence that they did in fact scrutinize Stout’s valua-
tion methods.
24                                                   No. 23-1073

                    2. Prohibited Transactions
    Lyon’s arguments for allowing his prohibited-transaction
claim against the post-2012 oﬃcers (SAC Count 25) to go for-
ward are even stronger. The district court grouped this claim
with the breach-of-duty claim against the directors and oﬃc-
ers, reasoning that although fraud is not an element of pro-
hibited transactions, Lyon’s theory of the case depended on
fraud. We disagree with that conclusion. For the reasons we
outlined above, we do not read Lyon’s claim so narrowly.
    ERISA’s background rule forbids a plan ﬁduciary from
causing the plan to purchase shares in the plan’s own com-
pany. See 29 U.S.C. § 1106(a)(1)(E). Were that prohibition ab-
solute, it would make all ESOPs illegal. The key is 29 U.S.C.
§ 1108(e), which allows a plan to buy the employer’s stock
“for adequate consideration,” deﬁned in 29 U.S.C.
§ 1002(18)(B) as the fair market value of the stock. But Lyon
need not plead facts showing that the transaction was for
more than fair market value. As we explained in Allen v. Great-
Banc Trust Co., the exceptions in section 1108 “are aﬃrmative
defenses for pleading purposes, and so the plaintiﬀ has no
duty to negate any or all of them.” 835 F.3d 670, 676 (7th Cir.
2016).
    The oﬃcers argue that Lyon took the burden upon himself
by alleging inadequate consideration in the SAC, but the same
was true in Allen. See First Amended Complaint at ¶ 42, Allen
v. GreatBanc Trust Co., No. 1:15-cv-3053 (N.D. Ill. Jan. 31, 2017)
(“[T]he prohibited transaction did not meet the conditional
exemption requirements of ERISA. … The facts indicate that
[the trustee] did not perform a good faith valuation of the Per-
sonal-Touch stock purchased by the Plan and that the Plan
paid substantially more than fair market value for Personal-
No. 23-1073                                                   25

Touch stock.”). We did not ascribe any signiﬁcance to the Al-
len plaintiﬀ’s choice to plead the absence of an exemption, and
we will not do so here either.
    Allen mandates reversal. Whether Lyon contends in the
end that the oﬃcers caused the Plan to enter the transaction
out of fraud or imprudence, all he had to allege was “that the
transaction was a prohibited one,” 835 F.3d at 675—or in other
words, that the oﬃcers caused the Plan to purchase Ap-
pvion’s shares, 29 U.S.C. § 1106(a)(1)(E). Lyon meets that re-
quirement. He alleges that the oﬃcers in the ESOP Committee
had (and exercised) the power to direct the trustees to pur-
chase Appvion’s stock, and that the trustees then did pur-
chase that stock. That is enough to save his claims from a mo-
tion to dismiss.
                    3. Co-Fiduciary Liability
    That leaves Lyon’s claims for co-fiduciary liability against
the directors, officers, State Street, and Reliance (SAC Counts
26–29). Because the district court dismissed all other ERISA
claims, it dismissed these as well; one cannot be liable as a co-
fiduciary without another fiduciary’s underlying violation.
But, having reversed the district court’s dismissal of the post-
2012 ERISA claims for direct violations, we must now deter-
mine whether that also means reviving the co-fiduciary
claims. We conclude that it does.
    ERISA creates three avenues for imposing liability on a fi-
duciary for her co-fiduciary’s violation of ERISA. Two of
these require that the fiduciary knew of her co-fiduciary’s
breach, and that the fiduciary either knowingly participated
in or concealed that breach, 29 U.S.C. § 1105(a)(1), or that the
fiduciary failed to make reasonable efforts to remedy the
26                                                  No. 23-1073

breach, 29 U.S.C. § 1105(a)(3). In contrast, the third avenue al-
lows for co-fiduciary liability when the fiduciary, by failing to
comply with her duties under ERISA, enabled her co-fiduci-
ary’s breach. 29 U.S.C. § 1105(a)(2). This provision does not
require knowledge of the other fiduciary’s breach; all it re-
quires is that the fiduciary’s breach of duty gave the co-fidu-
ciary the opportunity to breach. See Free v. Briody, 732 F.2d
1331, 1336 (7th Cir. 1984) (“A fiduciary also is to be liable for
the loss caused by the breach of fiduciary responsibility by
another fiduciary of the plan if he enables the other fiduciary
to commit a breach through his failure to exercise prudence.”
(quoting H. R. Conf. Rep. No. 93-1280 (1974), reprinted in 1974
U.S.C.C.A.N. 5038, 5080)).
    The defendants argue that Lyon fails to allege that they
knew of each other’s breaches. We need not decide if Lyon’s
allegations of knowledge are sufficient, however, because the
third avenue saves Lyon’s claims. Lyon has plausibly alleged
liability under 29 U.S.C. § 1105(a)(2). The directors and offic-
ers had the power to appoint or remove the trustees and the
concomitant duty to monitor them. Lyon alleges that if the di-
rectors and officers did not knowingly inflate Appvion’s
price, then their failure to monitor or remove the trustees al-
lowed the trustees to continue accepting Stout’s inflated val-
uations (whether willfully or carelessly). The same is true in
reverse. Lyon alleges that by approving Stout’s valuations
without sufficient scrutiny, the trustees allowed the ESOP
Committee to accept those valuations and to use them to au-
thorize purchases of Appvion shares by the Plan. Cf. Free, 732
F.2d at 1336 (“ERISA does not make a trustee an insurer
against a co-trustee’s misconduct, but the Act does require the
trustee to use reasonable care to prevent such a breach.”).
No. 23-1073                                                   27

                    C. The July 2012 Valuation
   At this point, we have explained why we are aﬃrming the
dismissal of the pre-2012 ERISA claims as time-barred but al-
lowing the post-2012 claims to go forward. That leaves one
minor line-drawing issue regarding the valuation issued by
Stout on July 16, 2012. Lyon argues that the part of his breach-
of-duty claim against State Street (SAC Count 3) related to this
valuation falls within the statute of repose because State Street
used that valuation to purchase shares of Appvion in Decem-
ber 2012. He presents several arguments to support that the-
ory, none of which we ﬁnd convincing.
   As we stated earlier, ERISA’s six-year statute of repose be-
gins running on “the date of the last action which constituted
a part of the breach or violation, or [ ] in the case of an omis-
sion the latest date on which the ﬁduciary could have cured
the breach or violation.” 29 U.S.C. § 1113(1). Lyon contends
that the “last action” constituting the breach was State Street’s
approval of stock purchases in December at the July-ap-
proved price.
    To identify the relevant date, we must “consider[ ] the na-
ture of the ﬁduciary duty” underlying the claim, Tibble v. Ed-
ison International, 575 U.S. 523, 528 (2015). That requires us to
“isolate and deﬁne the underlying violation upon which [the
plaintiﬀ’s] claim is founded.” Meagher v. International Ass’n of
Machinists & Aerospace Workers Pension Plan, 856 F.2d 1418,
1422 (9th Cir. 1988). The complaint is clear: Lyon’s breach-of-
duty claim against State Street is entirely about State Street’s
approval of Willamette’s and Stout’s inﬂated valuations. Lyon
brought a separate prohibited-transaction claim against State
Street for its role in approving purchases by the Plan using
those valuations (SAC Count 22), but the district court
28                                                   No. 23-1073

dismissed that claim because State Street did not have discre-
tionary authority over the purchases. Lyon did not appeal
that decision, and he cannot now combine the claim he ap-
pealed with the one he surrendered.
    For similar reasons, we are not convinced by Lyon’s at-
tempt to ﬁt his claim within the statute of repose’s language
for omissions. To be sure, it is often easy to recharacterize an
action as an omission (or vice versa); approving an inﬂated
valuation can be painted as failing to approve an accurate val-
uation or failing to correct an earlier inaccurate valuation. But
again, Lyon’s argument is belied by his complaint; the breach-
of-duty claim against State Street seeks to impose liability for
what State Street did, not for what it did not do.
    Lyon’s other argument is that State Street’s breach of duty
was not complete until its breach caused the Plan participants’
damages. Lyon is correct that the employees who purchased
shares in December suﬀered no damage from the inﬂated July
price—and therefore had no claim—until they made pur-
chased shares at that price. Were section 1113(1) a statute of
limitations, Lyon would have a point; statutes of limitations
do not start to run until a claim accrues. See CalPERS, 582 U.S.
at 504–05. But section 1113(1) is a statute of repose, id. at 507,
and it therefore starts running not when the claim accrues, but
“on ‘the date of the last culpable act or omission of the de-
fendant,’” id. at 505 (quoting CTS Corp., 573 U.S. at 8).
                      III.   Securities Fraud
   Lyon also brought four federal securities-fraud claims.
Three of these claims charge violations of section 10(b) of the
Securities Exchange Act of 1934, 15 U.S.C. § 78j(b), and SEC
Rule 10b-5, 17 C.F.R. § 240.10b-5. They allege that Stout,
No. 23-1073                                                    29

Reliance, and the oﬃcers who sat on the ESOP Committee
falsely represented the value of Paperweight stock through
their roles in setting the price of that stock. The fourth claim
is for control-person liability under 15 U.S.C. § 78t(a), alleging
that the Board members controlled the ESOP Committee and
are therefore liable for the four oﬃcers’ misconduct. Because
securities-fraud claims are subject to a ﬁve-year statute of re-
pose, 28 U.S.C. § 1658(b)(2), Lyon’s claims reach only conduct
occurring on or after November 26, 2013.
                       A. Rule 10b-5 Claims
    We ﬁrst take up the 10b-5 claims. While the Court has rec-
ognized private securities-fraud lawsuits as essential to en-
forcing federal securities law, both it and Congress have
acknowledged that “such lawsuits have also been subject to
abuse.” Amgen Inc. v. Connecticut Retirement Plans & Trust
Funds, 568 U.S. 455, 475 (2013). Both institutions therefore
have erected barriers—including heightened pleading stand-
ards—against meritless securities-fraud claims. A plaintiﬀ
bringing a claim under Rule 10b-5 must plead: “(1) a material
misrepresentation or omission by the defendant; (2) scienter;
(3) a connection between the misrepresentation or omission
and the purchase or sale of a security; (4) reliance upon the
misrepresentation or omission; (5) economic loss; and (6) loss
causation.” Pugh v. Tribune Co., 521 F.3d 686, 693 (7th Cir.
2008). The district court dismissed the claims solely based on
Lyon’s failure adequately to plead scienter, and we can aﬃrm
on that basis without discussing the other elements.
   For most claims, including those under ERISA, we do not
weigh competing inferences at the pleading stage. Securities-
fraud actions are diﬀerent. Under the Private Securities Liti-
gation Reform Act (PSLRA), a plaintiﬀ adequately pleads
30                                                    No. 23-1073

scienter only if she “state[s] with particularity facts giving rise
to a strong inference that the defendant acted with the re-
quired state of mind.” 15 U.S.C. § 78u-4(b)(2)(A). In Tellabs,
Inc. v. Makor Issues & Rights, Ltd., the Supreme Court inter-
preted the phrase “strong inference” to require that “a reason-
able person would deem the inference of scienter cogent and
at least as compelling as any opposing inference one could
draw from the facts alleged.” 551 U.S. 308, 324 (2007).
    We therefore must take the complaint as a whole and dis-
miss unless the inference that the defendants acted with sci-
enter—that is, with the intent to deceive or with reckless indif-
ference as to the truth of their statements—is at least as com-
pelling as the inference that the defendants merely made care-
less mistakes. Pension Trust Fund for Operating Engineers v.
Kohl’s Corp., 895 F.3d 933, 936–37 (7th Cir. 2018) (“Pension
Trust”). We conclude that Lyon has not cleared that diﬃcult
hurdle with respect to any of the defendants.
                            1. Stout
    In SAC Count 35, Lyon alleges that Stout and two of its
managing directors, Scott Levine and Aziz El-Tahch, contin-
ued the fraud initiated by Willamette by giving Reliance in-
ﬂated valuations of Appvion. Though both Lyon and Stout
devote considerable portions of their briefs to arguing the
merits of Stout’s valuations, this case comes to us at the mo-
tion-to-dismiss stage, and so we must assume that Stout’s val-
uations overstated the value of Appvion. The only question
before us is whether Lyon’s alleged explanation for that dis-
crepancy (that Stout intentionally misrepresented Appvion’s
value) is at least as likely as the alternative explanation (that
Stout and its oﬃcers simply did a bad job).
No. 23-1073                                                      31

    The biggest obstacle to Lyon’s claim against Stout is his
failure to identify a motive. Stout received a ﬂat fee for each
of its valuations, without any bonus payments for using a par-
ticular methodology or arriving at a particular valuation. We
assume that Stout had an interest in continuing to receive
those ﬂat fees, and that it might have feared that Reliance
would switch to a diﬀerent appraiser if it stopped issuing in-
ﬂated valuations of Appvion. But we concluded, even before
Tellabs, that continued business and ﬂat fees, “standing
alone,” typically “will not suﬃce to establish fraudulent in-
tent.” Tricontinental Indus., Ltd., v. PricewaterhouseCoopers, LLP,
475 F.3d 824, 841 (7th Cir. 2007). All third-party contractors
have an interest in retaining the business of their customers,
and so any plaintiﬀ could point to that interest to establish
scienter. See id.
    Instead of trying to show that Stout, Levine, and El-Tahch
had a motive beyond retaining Reliance’s business, Lyon
seizes on language in Tellabs agreeing with our court’s conclu-
sion “that the absence of a motive allegation is not fatal” to
pleading scienter. 551 U.S. at 325 (quoting Makor Issues &
Rights, Ltd. v. Tellabs, Inc., 437 F.3d 588, 601 (7th Cir 2006)). In
that same paragraph, however, the Court told us that “the sig-
niﬁcance that can be ascribed to an allegation of motive, or
lack thereof, depends on the entirety of the complaint.” Id.
The context of Tellabs is informative. There, the securities-
fraud claim was against the CEO of a company, and the plain-
tiﬀ did not allege that the CEO had sold any of his shares at
the allegedly inﬂated price. Although the Court did not de-
cide whether the plaintiﬀ had adequately pleaded scienter,
neither did it ﬁnd the lack of a direct ﬁnancial motive dispos-
itive. Its reasoning is easy to follow. The CEO of a company
has a strong incentive to make her company appear more
32                                                  No. 23-1073

successful than it is, even if she does not directly beneﬁt ﬁnan-
cially by selling her shares in the company.
    That logic makes considerably less sense in our case. Stout
is a global investment banker with many clients. While it
likely has some incentive to be seen as cooperative by those
clients, its “greatest asset is its reputation for honesty fol-
lowed closely by its reputation for careful work.” DiLeo, 901
F.2d at 629. The ﬂat fees it received from Reliance and Argent
“could not approach the losses [it] would suﬀer from a per-
ception that it would muﬄe a client’s fraud.” Id. As for Levine
and El-Tahch, although their interests “may have diverged
from the ﬁrm’s, covering up fraud and imposing large dam-
ages on the partnership will bring a halt to the most promis-
ing career.” Id. Stout and its managing directors “shared none
of the gain from any fraud,” id., and Lyon’s theory would re-
quire us to credit the possibility that Stout would risk follow-
ing in the footsteps of Enron simply to keep one of its many
clients happy. Without a showing of motive or additional
facts tending to show intent, we cannot conclude that it is at
least as likely that Stout acted with intent as that Stout (per-
haps mistakenly) thought its methods were sound.
                          2. Reliance
    Lyon similarly failed to show motive in his claim against
Reliance (SAC Count 31), which also received only ﬂat fees
from its trusteeship over the Plan’s assets. Also cutting against
scienter is the fact that Reliance was less familiar with the al-
legedly fraudulent valuations than Stout; Stout prepared the
valuations, while Reliance only reviewed them. True, we
noted in the context of Lyon’s breach-of-duty claims that se-
curing an independent appraisal is not a blank check; Reli-
ance may have had a ﬁduciary duty to scrutinize Stout’s
No. 23-1073                                                    33

valuation methods. See Keach, 419 F.3d at 637. But the failure
to abide by a ﬁduciary duty is not enough to show scienter.
See Pugh, 521 F.3d at 694. Without more to show that Reliance
should have been aware of Stout’s alleged fraud, the com-
plaint does not do enough “to show why [Reliance] was reck-
less, rather than just negligent.” Pension Trust, 895 F.3d at 940.
     Lyon contends that Reliance should have been aware of
the fraud because the excluded debt and control premium
had such large eﬀects on the valuations that Reliance must
have noticed them. But it is one thing to show that Reliance
knew what price Stout recommended for Appvion’s shares,
and another thing entirely to show that Reliance knew those
recommendations to be faulty. See Cornielsen v. Inﬁnium Cap-
ital Mgmt., LLC, 916 F.3d 589, 602 (7th Cir. 2019) (“[A] com-
plaint fails to satisfy the PSLRA’s particularity requirements
by making conclusory allegations of scienter derived from a
defendant’s mere access to information.”).
    From Reliance’s perspective, Stout’s valuations just as eas-
ily could have looked like business as usual. When Reliance
took over as trustee in 2013, Stout had previously appraised a
share of Appvion as being worth $17.55. Stout gave Reliance
two valuations during the latter’s tenure: the June 30, 2013,
valuation of $17.85, and the December 31, 2013, valuation of
$16.25. Only in December 2014, after the end of Reliance’s
trusteeship, did Stout’s valuations of Appvion start to plum-
met. To assume that Reliance must have been aware of “red
ﬂags” in Appvion’s price because that price later dropped sig-
niﬁcantly relies too heavily on hindsight. Our cases repeat-
edly have rejected this reasoning. Pugh, 521 F.3d at 694.
34                                                     No. 23-1073

                  3. ESOP Committee Oﬃcers
    Lyon’s third Rule 10b-5 claim (SAC Count 33) is against
the oﬃcers on the ESOP Committee. They were in charge of
approving Stout’s valuations and causing the Plan to pur-
chase more shares of Appvion. Unlike his claims against Stout
and Reliance, Lyon supports the claim against the oﬃcers
with a substantial allegation of motive: under various “incen-
tive plans,” the oﬃcers received cash bonuses based on Ap-
pvion’s appraised price. (Although that price dropped in al-
most every valuation during the relevant period, Lyon alleges
that the price would have dropped even more had Stout
properly appraised Appvion’s value, and so the oﬃcers’ pay-
outs would have been even lower in the absence of the alleged
fraud.) Tellabs indicates that “personal ﬁnancial gain may
weigh heavily in favor of a scienter inference,” 551 U.S. at 325,
which is especially true here because verifying Stout’s valua-
tions was such an integral part of the ESOP Committee’s mis-
sion, cf. Makor Issues & Rights, Ltd. v. Tellabs, Inc., 513 F.3d 702,
711 (7th Cir. 2008) (holding, on remand from Tellabs, that the
plaintiﬀs suﬃciently pleaded scienter because it was “exceed-
ingly unlikely” that the CEO was “unaware of the problems
of his company’s two major products”).
    Although the oﬃcers’ motive makes this a close question,
we nonetheless conclude that Lyon has failed to clear the sci-
enter bar. Our post-Tellabs cases generally have rejected the
notion that the exercise of options and receipt of bonuses is
enough to show scienter. See Plumbers and Pipeﬁtters Local Un-
ion 719 Pension Fund v. Zimmer Holdings, Inc., 679 F.3d 952, 956
(7th Cir. 2012) (“Plaintiﬀs contend that we should infer scien-
ter because … top managers had an incentive to make [their
company] look good in order to keep their jobs, improve their
No. 23-1073                                                    35

bonuses, and increase the value of their stock options. This is
too generic to satisfy Tellabs.”); Pugh, 521 F.3d at 695 (“[S]tock
sales must generally be unusual or suspicious to constitute
circumstantial evidence of scienter.”).
    Lyon alleges that the oﬃcers had a motive not to question
Stout’s valuations, but without some allegation that they
knew those valuations to be inﬂated, he cannot show that
fraud is a more likely inference than incompetence. And Lyon
does not state facts showing that the oﬃcers knew the valua-
tions were inﬂated; the SAC charges that they “knew about
the irregularities with the valuations because they reviewed
and approved the valuations,” but again, knowing what the
valuations are is not the same as knowing they are inﬂated.
Higginbotham v. Baxter International, Inc., 495 F.3d 753, 758 (7th
Cir. 2007); see also Cornielsen, 916 F.3d at 602. Lyon’s pro-
posed approach would have us ﬁnd scienter any time a corpo-
rate oﬃcer stood to gain from a high share price and ap-
proved ﬁnancial statements that later turned out to be in-
ﬂated. That would not be consistent with Tellabs.
                    B. Control-Person Liability
    Control-person liability claims require an allegation that
the defendant controlled someone who is liable under an-
other provision of federal securities law. 15 U.S.C. § 78t(a). Be-
cause we have aﬃrmed the dismissal of all of Lyon’s other
federal securities-fraud claims, Lyon’s control-person liability
claim against the Board members (SAC Count 34) also falls.
                         IV.     State Law
   We wrap up with Lyon’s state-law theories, which have
been carried forward from the FAC. The district court dis-
missed all nine of them, mainly as preempted by ERISA. Lyon
36                                                  No. 23-1073

now presses six on appeal, even though he did not replead
them in the SAC. It may have been better practice to reassert
them (if only to give notice of which claims he meant to pre-
serve), but the district court would have dismissed those
claims on the same grounds as before. That is why, when a
court dismisses a claim without prejudice, a plaintiﬀ is not re-
quired to replead that claim in a subsequent complaint. See
Bastian v. Petren Resources Corp., 892 F.2d 680, 682–83 (7th Cir.
1990).
    Houlihan argues that Lyon has waived the state-law theo-
ries, but the cases on which he relies do not stand for that
proposition. They involve plaintiﬀs who voluntarily removed
claims by amending their complaints, without the district
court ﬁrst dismissing the claims. See, e.g., Prymer v. Ogden, 29
F.3d 1208, 1215 & n.6 (7th Cir. 1994). Unlike Bastian and the
present case, those cases therefore did not involve “a previous
ruling of the district judge adverse to the appellant.” 892 F.2d
at 682. Those cases instead stand for the unsurprising propo-
sition that because an amended complaint supersedes the
original complaint, a plaintiﬀ who deletes a claim from her
complaint (without allowing the district court to rule on it
ﬁrst) waives that claim. Lubin v. Chicago Title & Trust Co., 260
F.2d 411, 413 (7th Cir. 1958). Here, there was no waiver, and
so we proceed to this last set of arguments.
                           A. Houlihan
    Lyon asserts three state-law theories against Houlihan:
breach of ﬁduciary duty, fraud, and negligent misrepresenta-
tion (FAC Counts 17–19). The district court held that the
causes of action were preempted by ERISA and that, even if
they were not, they failed on the merits. Lyon argues that they
No. 23-1073                                                     37

are not preempted, largely because Houlihan was not a ﬁdu-
ciary of the Plan.
     The problem with Lyon’s position is that his opening brief
did not challenge the district court’s alternative holding on
the merits of the claims. When a district court bases its ruling
on two grounds and a plaintiﬀ challenges only one on appeal,
she “waive[s] any claim of error in that ruling.” Landstrom v.
Illinois Dep’t of Children & Family Services, 892 F.2d 670, 678
(7th Cir. 1990). That is because even if we reversed the district
court’s preemption holding as to the claims against Houlihan,
its dismissal of those claims on the merits would remain un-
touched.
    Lyon asks us to overlook his waiver. But our ability to
overlook waiver in civil cases “is severely constricted,” and in
most cases “a civil litigant ‘should be bound by his counsel’s
actions.’” S.E.C. v. Yang, 795 F.3d 674, 679 (7th Cir. 2015) (quot-
ing Deppe v. Tripp, 863 F.2d 1356, 1360 (7th Cir. 2010)). Lyon
claims that this is not such a case, insisting that we can reach
his argument under United States v. Blagojevich, 612 F.3d 558
(7th Cir. 2010). But Blagojevich is inapposite. There, the district
court denied a third party’s motion to intervene on both pro-
cedural and substantive grounds. The would-be intervenors
appealed and challenged only the substantive ground. We
noted that, under the usual rule, this “doomed their appeal,
because if you lose for two independent reasons an appellate
victory on one does not aﬀect the judgment.” Id. at 560. But
we also noted that the appellee’s brief “met the non-argument
on the merits, and at oral argument” the appellee represented
that it was not invoking the forfeiture doctrine. Id. We there-
fore held that the appellee had “forfeited the beneﬁt of appel-
lants’ forfeiture.” Id. Not so here. Houlihan’s response brief
38                                                  No. 23-1073

did argue the merits of the state-law theories against it, but it
also argued that Lyon waived them. And at oral argument,
Houlihan’s counsel made it clear that they were not giving
Lyon the leeway that the Blagojevich appellee had given its op-
posing counsel.
    We recognize the appeal of overlooking Lyon’s waiver.
His opening brief had to address dozens of claims against ﬁve
groups of defendants, and so some arguments may have
slipped through the cracks. But while the waiver doctrine can
seem harsh, there are also good reasons for enforcing it. Be-
cause Lyon failed to raise all his arguments in his opening
brief, he forced Houlihan to guess what claims it had to de-
fend against. To cover all its bases, Houlihan dedicated over
nine full pages of its brief to the ERISA claims against it, even
though Lyon later stated in his reply brief that he had aban-
doned those claims on appeal. The waiver doctrine exists in
part to prevent that problem. Because Houlihan has unambig-
uously invoked that doctrine, we must apply it.
                     B. Directors and Oﬃcers
    Lyon also brought a state-law count against the directors
and oﬃcers for breach of ﬁduciary duty (FAC Count 16). The
district court dismissed this theory solely on grounds of
ERISA preemption, and Lyon challenged that holding in his
opening brief. We therefore may reach that issue.
    ERISA contains an expansive preemption clause; its pro-
visions “supersede any and all State laws insofar as they may
now or hereafter relate to any employee beneﬁt plan” covered
by ERISA. 29 U.S.C. § 1144. Of course, any case involving an
ESOP might theoretically “relate to” an employee beneﬁt
plan. The Supreme Court, however, has not adopted such a
No. 23-1073                                                     39

broad interpretation, “caution[ing] against an ‘uncritical liter-
alism’ that would make pre-emption turn on ‘inﬁnite connec-
tions.’” Egelhoﬀ v. Egelhoﬀ, 532 U.S. 141, 147 (2001) (quoting
New York State Conf. of Blue Cross & Blue Shield Plans v. Travelers
Ins. Co., 514 U.S. 645, 656 (1995)). Instead, ERISA preempts a
law if the law “has a connection with or reference to such a
plan.” Shaw v. Delta Air Lines, Inc., 463 U.S. 85, 96–97 (1983).
Wisconsin laws governing ﬁduciary duties are laws of general
applicability, and so they do not in terms “reference” ERISA
plans. See Rutledge v. Pharma. Care Mgmt. Assoc., 592 US. 80,
88 (2020) (“A law refers to ERISA if it acts immediately and
exclusively upon ERISA plans or where the existence of
ERISA plans is essential to the law’s operation.” (cleaned up)
(quoting Gobeille v. Liberty Mut. Ins. Co., 577 U.S. 312, 319–20
(2016))).
    Whether a law has a connection with ERISA plans is usu-
ally a diﬃcult question, but another case arising from Ap-
pvion’s bankruptcy gives us a helpful starting point. Recall
that Paperweight, the company through which the Plan ac-
quired Appvion, funded its purchase in part with contribu-
tions from the retirement accounts of the Plan participants,
but in much larger part with over $700 million in debt. In
Halperin v. Richards, 7 F.4th 534 (7th Cir. 2021), Paperweight’s
creditors brought claims for breaches of state-law duties
against the directors and oﬃcers, as well as aiding-and-abet-
ting claims against Stout and Argent. We held that ERISA
preempted the claims against Stout and Argent, but not the
claims against the directors and oﬃcers.
    Halperin dealt with the problem of dual-hat ﬁduciaries.
ERISA’s exclusive-beneﬁt rule requires that plan ﬁduciaries
act solely in the interests of the plan’s participants. At the
40                                                No. 23-1073

same time, ERISA allows a company’s directors and oﬃcers
to serve as plan ﬁduciaries. As a matter of corporate law, di-
rectors and oﬃcers have a ﬁduciary duty to the corporation.
Thus, a director or oﬃcer serving as an ERISA ﬁduciary owes
“parallel but independent” duties to the plan’s participants
and to the corporation. That explains why we found the
claims in Halperin against the directors and oﬃcers not to be
preempted by ERISA. Preempting those claims by the
Halperin creditors—who could not sue under ERISA, see 29
U.S.C. § 1132(a)—would have left them without recourse for
the (alleged) fraud by the directors and oﬃcers. This would
have created a loophole, contrary to the goals of ERISA, for
corporate malfeasance.
    Halperin expressly reserved the question presented here:
whether “ERISA would preempt similar corporation-law
claims brought by ERISA beneﬁciaries, participants, or ﬁdu-
ciaries who can sue Appvion’s directors and oﬃcers under
ERISA for the same conduct.” 7 F.4th at 545. Perhaps ERISA
would not preempt such claims if the directors and oﬃcers
owed Appvion’s owners some state-law duty separate from
the duties it owed them under ERISA, and perhaps the em-
ployees could have sued over that duty as shareholders rather
than as plan participants. But when asked at oral argument,
Lyon was unable to point to any conduct that qualiﬁed as a
breach of a state-law duty, but not as a breach of an ERISA
duty, nor have we been able to identify any. On this record,
Lyon’s state-law claims arise entirely from the Plan partici-
pants’ ERISA-governed ownership of Appvion. The state-law
duties that Lyon accuses the directors and oﬃcers of breach-
ing are the same duties he charges them with breaching in his
ERISA claims, and they are owed to the same people. That
makes Lyon’s state-law claim against the directors and
No. 23-1073                                                       41

oﬃcers little more than an “alternative enforcement mecha-
nism,” and alternative enforcement mechanisms have a con-
nection with (and therefore relate to) ERISA plans. See Trus-
tees of AFTRA Health Fund v. Biondi, 303 F.3d 765, 775 (7th Cir.
2002).
                               C. Stout
    Lyon’s ﬁnal state-law claims on appeal are against Stout
for fraud and negligent misrepresentation (FAC Counts 10
and 12). Lyon did not waive his challenge to these claims, but
they suﬀer the same fate as the claim against the directors and
oﬃcers. ERISA allows the Secretary of Labor to sue non-ﬁdu-
ciaries such as Stout for knowingly participating in another
ﬁduciary’s violation. See Harris Trust & Savings Bank v. Salo-
mon Smith Barney, Inc., 530 U.S. 238, 248 (2000). We have re-
served the question whether ERISA allows private parties to
bring such suits as well. Halperin, 7 F.4th at 553 n.3.
    Even assuming that ERISA confers on Lyon a private right
of action against Stout, however, he could seek only equitable
relief, not damages. See Mertens v. Hewitt Associates, 508 U.S.
248, 255 (1993). But he has asked for damages. See FAC at 205.
Thus, as in Halperin, “state-law liability for Stout could lead to
a damages remedy that would arguably conﬂict with ERISA’s
remedial limits on claims against non-ﬁduciaries.” 7 F.4th at
553; see also Pilot Life Ins. Co. v. Dedeaux, 481 U.S. 41, 54 (1987).
Lyon’s claims against Stout therefore seem to us an “end run
around ERISA’s more limited remedial scheme.” Halperin, 7
F.4th at 541. ERISA preempts such claims.
                         V.      Conclusion
   We AFFIRM the dismissal of FAC Counts 10, 12, and 16–
19 and SAC Counts 4–7, 11, 19–21, 31, and 33–35. We
42                                                No. 23-1073

REVERSE and REMAND SAC Counts 1, 3, 8–10, 12–18, and
25–29 to the extent they seek recovery for conduct taking
place after November 26, 2012, and REMAND those claims to
the district court for further proceedings consistent with this
opinion.