19 Jun 2023 Target Shareholders Take Legal Action as Company’s Pride and Politics Sink Their Investments

“Well, it’s finally happened. A company has strayed so far into politics, at the demonstrable and shattering detriment to its bottom line, that shareholders have begun a process that – unless Target mends its ways – will end in court.”

In a RealClearMarkets commentary, Free Enterprise Project (FEP) Director Scott Shepard describes the action that FEP, its legal representation — Boyden Gray & Associates and America First Legal — and likely soon other shareholders are taking to hold Target accountable for the way its leaders have tanked the company’s bottom line:

I very much doubt that we will remain the only shareholder demandants in this case, or the only plaintiffs, should this proceed to suit. Nor do I think that Target is the only company that will face such demands; the clearer it becomes that putting politics before demonstrable corporate value hurts the latter, the more interest will arise in pursuing these efforts.

Scott provides the background of the Target controversy and explains why he believes Target should now be concerned about liability. He says the goal of this legal action “is to establish how Target went about setting itself and its share value on fire.”

Even if Target’s leaders can talk their way out of a lawsuit, Scott says it is then incumbent upon them to clean house:

If they can make a credible showing that their breach of fiduciary duty was the result of profound incompetence rather than willful behavior, they might avoid personal liability.

But if that’s true, then the last competent people left at Target would certainly have a duty to wholly reorganize the top of the company with new leaders who have been picked specifically, in part, for their ability to understand fiduciary duty and to think beyond the woke echo chamber – because failure to clean house that way would then make any similar future screwups intentional.

Read Scott’s entire commentary here.