If you purchased or acquired The Boeing Company common stock listed on a U.S. exchange and registered with the Commission and traded under the symbol BA (the “Security”) during the period between November 28, 2018 and October 17, 2019, inclusive, (“Relevant Period”), you may be entitled to a Distribution Payment from the Boeing Fair Fund.
Background
On September 22, 2022, the Commission issued two separate, but related Orders instituting and simultaneously settling cease-and-desist proceedings against the Respondents. In the Orders, the Commission found that the Respondents failed to exercise reasonable care in making statements to the public following two fatal accidents (the Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302) involving its new 737 MAX line of aircraft. Those failures resulted in Respondents making materially misleading statements to investors in Boeing’s November 27, 2018 press release about the Lion Air crash and in Muilenburg’s public statements in April 2019 following the Ethiopian Airlines crash. By failing to exercise reasonable care to ensure those statements provided all facts necessary to make those statements to investors not misleading under the circumstances, Boeing and Muilenburg violated Sections 17(a)(2) and 17(a)(3) of the Securities Act of 1933. In their respective Orders, the Commission ordered Boeing and Muilenburg to pay $200,000,000 and $1,000,000 in civil money penalties, respectively, to the Commission. In each of the Orders, the Commission also created a Fair Fund, pursuant to Section 308(a) of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, so the penalties paid can be distributed to harmed investors, and further ordered that the funds may be combined with any other distribution or Fair Fund arising out of the same facts that are the subject of the Order.
The Respondents have paid in full. In accordance with the Orders, the $201,000,000 paid by the Respondents has been combined and comprises the Fair Fund. The Fair Fund has been deposited in a Commission-designated account at the U.S. Department of the Treasury, and any accrued interest will be added to the Fair Fund.