A proposed settlement between Ryanair (FR, Dublin International) and a pension fund in the United States will be heard at the Court for the Southern District of New York on October 20 at 1230L (1630Z), the lead counsel in the case announced on July 26. Any objections to the settlement must be filed by September 29.
The budget carrier’s parent, Ryanair Holdings, and chief executive Michael O’Leary reached a cash settlement of USD5 million with the pension fund on June 7 aided by mediation. The Alabama-based City of Birmingham Firemen’s and Policemen’s Supplemental Pension System had led a class action suit against the airline in 2018, claiming it and O’Leary had made false and misleading statements to shareholders about employment issues at the airline.
The statements - including O’Leary’s comment at Ryanair’s 2017 annual general meeting that hell would “freeze over” before the Dublin-based carrier accepted unions - had been made before Ryanair took the step of recognising pilot unions in December 2017 in order to avert a strike. The fund claimed that the statements had artificially inflated share prices that plummeted when some Ryanair workers later unionised, causing losses in shareholder value.
Ryanair welcomed the June 7 settlement, saying it was “in the interests of all shareholders.”
As the lead counsel in the case, Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd LLP announced that a hearing would be held on October 20 for the purpose of determining whether the proposed settlement “should be approved as fair, reasonable, and adequate to the members” of the class action suit, and whether the release of the claims against Ryanair should be authorised. “Any objection to the settlement, the plan of allocation, or the fee and expense application must be mailed [to the court, to the lead counsel, or to the defendants’ counsel Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP] no later than September 29,” the statement said.
