Meta sanctions against former COO Sandberg’s lawsuit against investors to delete emails

by Tom Hales

WILMINGTON, Delaware (Reuters) – MetaPlatforms’ former chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg was sanctioned by a judge on Tuesday for deleting emails related to Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal despite being told to protect the messages.

The judge, Vice Chancellor Travis Laster, of the Delaware Chancery Court, said the evidence showed Sandberg used a personal account to delete messages relevant to the shareholder lawsuit.

The sanctions will make it difficult for Sandberg to tell her side of the story and avoid impeachment during an eight-day jury trial in April. The judge also ordered California’s giant teachers’ retirement system, known as CalSTRS, to pay costs related to an injunction filed by shareholders.

“Since Sandberg selectively deleted items from her Gmail account, the most sensitive and challenging exchanges were lost,” Laster wrote in an opinion piece published Tuesday.

Meta and Sandberg’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Sandberg argued that she was forthcoming about the personal account and rarely used it for business, and that when she did, others copied the messages so the information was protected.

Laster sets the standard for “clear and convincing evidence” rather than “invitation” of evidence, affirmative defenses for Sandberg, which are her arguments and evidence why they should not be held liable.

The case was In 2018, Facebook allowed access to the data of millions of users by Cambridge Analytica during Donald Trump’s successful campaign for the US presidency in 2016.

Shareholders sued the company’s directors and officers for repeatedly violating a 2012 consent order with the Federal Trade Commission to protect consumer data, causing harm to investors.

The company’s board of shareholders negotiated a $5 billion fine to the FTC in 2019 to avoid personal liability for founder Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg is expected to resign a second time before the trial, according to court records.

In the year In 2023, Laster refused to dismiss the allegation, saying it was “an allegation of a truly monumental scale.”

Shareholders are demanding that Luster punish Jeffrey Zientes, former chief of staff to President Joe Biden, who also used and deleted private emails while on the Meta board. The judge said Zientes’ messages were less relevant because he joined Meta’s board in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018 and was not an officer of the company.

(Reporting by Tom Hales in Wilmington, Delaware; Editing by Leslie Adler)