New York
Dozens of BuzzFeed Employees Claim They Were Illegally Shortchanged in I.P.O.
Greater than 40 former and present staff of BuzzFeed accused the corporate in a criticism on Tuesday of bungling its inventory market debut and denying the employees the prospect to promote their shares at a better worth.
Within the declare, made to the American Arbitration Affiliation, which resolves disputes out of courtroom, the staff mentioned the corporate did not correctly instruct them on the best way to commerce their shares instantly after the preliminary public providing in December.
The group is asking for compensatory damages estimated at greater than $4.6 million, in keeping with the declare, which was considered by The New York Instances.
“The Kafkaesque tribulations by means of which the claimants had been dragged have wreaked havoc on their monetary lives,” the criticism mentioned.
BuzzFeed didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
BuzzFeed, a information and leisure writer, grew to become the primary digital media firm to go public when it started buying and selling on Dec. 6. The corporate’s inventory worth fell sharply within the days after it went public, and the group of staff say they weren’t in a position to promote their shares till the value had dropped by practically 60 %, or lower than $5.
Some staff are nonetheless unable to promote their shares, in keeping with the criticism.
The arbitration motion represents 44 staff, who collectively had greater than 400,000 shares of BuzzFeed inventory on the time it went public. It was filed earlier than the American Arbitration Affiliation due to a clause within the staff’ contracts that requires sure disputes to go to arbitration as an alternative of heading to courtroom. That clause is frequent in lots of employment contracts as an effort to stop class motion lawsuits. Arbitration claims are determined by an neutral third social gathering, although many are settled earlier than that call.
Along with naming BuzzFeed and a few of its high executives as defendants, together with its founder, Jonah Peretti, the criticism names Adam Rothstein, the manager chairman of a shell firm that merged with BuzzFeed, and Continental Inventory Switch, a switch agent employed to assist with its preliminary public providing.
Mr. Rothstein and Continental didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
BuzzFeed was co-founded by Mr. Peretti in 2006. In line with the declare, the group of staff, which incorporates reporters, net builders, editors and salespeople, had principally joined BuzzFeed in its early days when it was a scrappy start-up. They accepted low salaries as a result of they had been additionally given inventory choices, the staff mentioned, and Mr. Peretti often promoted the eventual plan to take the corporate public.
In June final 12 months, BuzzFeed introduced its plans to merge with a particular function acquisition firm, or SPAC, known as 890 Fifth Avenue Companions to be able to go public. The deal valued BuzzFeed at $1.5 billion. The corporate is value about one-third of that now.
By the point of the merger in December, about 94 % of the over $250 million raised by the SPAC was withdrawn by traders, leaving the corporate with solely $16 million. The criticism argued that due to this, BuzzFeed executives had a fiduciary obligation to re-evaluate the plans to go public. However the I.P.O. went forward, and BuzzFeed started buying and selling on the Nasdaq on Dec. 6 beneath the ticker image BZFD.
The staff, the declare mentioned, had been wanting ahead to lastly cashing of their shares however shortly realized that they had been unable to take action as a result of they’d not been advised further steps had been wanted to transform their Class B shares earlier than they may promote them.
The blunder will not be related to what is usually referred to as a “lockup” settlement that stops high executives from promoting shares for a specified time frame, usually about six months. On this case, staff may promote as quickly as they filed crucial paperwork forward of the general public debut, however they weren’t given sufficient time to finish the applying till after the corporate hit the inventory market, the staff say.
Communications from Continental and BuzzFeed supplied contradictory and imprecise recommendation concerning the inventory transfers, in keeping with the criticism, and staff had been advised the conversion of shares would take three to 5 enterprise days. On the identical time, BuzzFeed’s inventory worth, which had spiked in early buying and selling, was quickly dropping.
“Because of this, Claimants — a few of whom nonetheless are unable to commerce their shares as of the date of this submitting — misplaced the chance to promote their hard-earned shares for good worth and have been left with inventory buying and selling at a mere fraction of its I.P.O. worth,” the criticism mentioned.
One worker texted with Mr. Peretti on Dec. 6 to specific his frustration, and, in keeping with the criticism, Mr. Peretti complained that he had not been in a position to money out his shares at as excessive a worth as he had hoped, both. On Dec. 7, 2021, BuzzFeed emailed staff and mentioned they “sympathize together with your frustration with this course of.”
BuzzFeed will report earnings on March 22 for the primary time since going public.
New York
We Counted 22,252 Cars to See How Much Congestion Pricing Might Have Made This Morning
Today would have been the first Monday of New York City’s congestion pricing plan. Before it was halted by Gov. Kathy Hochul, the plan was designed to rein in some of the nation’s worst traffic while raising a billion dollars for the subway every year, one toll at a time.
A year’s worth of tolls is hard to picture. But what about a day’s worth? What about an hour’s?
To understand how the plan could have worked, we went to the edges of the tolling zone during the first rush hour that the fees would have kicked in.
Here’s what we saw:
You probably wouldn’t have seen every one of those cars if the program had been allowed to proceed. That’s because officials said the fees would have discouraged some drivers from crossing into the tolled zone, leading to an estimated 17 percent reduction in traffic. (It’s also Monday on a holiday week.)
The above video was just at one crossing point, on Lexington Avenue. We sent 27 people to count vehicles manually at four bridges, four tunnels and nine streets where cars entered the business district. In total, we counted 22,252 cars, trucks, motorcycles and buses between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. on Monday.
We wanted to see how the dense flow of traffic into the central business district would have generated money in real time.
Though we can’t know that dollar amount precisely, we can hazard a guess. Congestion pricing was commonly referred to as a $15-per-car toll, but it wasn’t so simple. There were going to be smaller fees for taxi trips, credits for the tunnels, heftier charges for trucks and buses, and a number of exemptions.
To try to account for all that fee variance, we used estimates from the firm Replica, which models traffic data, on who enters the business district, as well as records from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and city agencies. We also made a few assumptions where data wasn’t available. We then came up with a ballpark figure for how much the city might have generated in an hour at those toll points.
The total? About $200,000 in tolls for that hour.
It’s far from a perfect guess. Our vehicle total is definitely an undercount: We counted only the major entrances — bridges, tunnels and 60th Street — which means we missed all the cars that entered the zone by exiting the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive or the West Side Highway.
And our translation into a dollar number is rough. Among many other choices we had to make, we assumed all drivers had E-ZPass — saving them a big surcharge — and we couldn’t distinguish between transit buses and charter buses, so we gave all buses an exemption.
But it does give you a rough sense of scale: It’s a lot of cars, and a lot of money. Over the course of a typical day, hundreds of thousands of vehicles stream into the Manhattan central business district through various crossings.
Trips into tolling district, per Replica estimates
Queens-Midtown Tunnel
50,600
Lincoln Tunnel
49,200
Williamsburg Bridge
27,900
Manhattan Bridge
24,000
Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel
23,100
Queensboro Bridge
21,700
Brooklyn Bridge
17,100
Holland Tunnel
15,400
All other entrances
118,000
Total
347,000
The tolling infrastructure that was installed for the program cost roughly half a billion dollars.
The M.T.A. had planned to use the congestion pricing revenue estimates to secure $15 billion in financing for subway upgrades. Many of those improvement plans have now been suspended.
New York
Transcript of Trump Manhattan Trial, May 30, 2024
-
Jury Deliberation Re-charge
SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK
COUNTY OF NEW YORK CRIMINAL TERM
-
-
PART: 59
Χ
THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK,
-against-
DONALD J. TRUMP,
DEFENDANT.
BEFORE:
Indict. No.
71543-2023
CHARGE
4909
FALSIFYING BUSINESS
RECORDS 1ST DEGREE
JURY TRIAL
100 Centre Street
New York, New York 10013
May 30, 2024
HONORABLE JUAN M. MERCHAN
JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT
APPEARANCES:
FOR THE PEOPLE:
ALVIN BRAGG, JR., ESQ.
DISTRICT ATTORNEY, NEW YORK COUNTY
One Hogan Place
New York, New York 10013
BY:
JOSHUA STEINGLASS, ESQ.
MATTHEW COLANGELO,
ESQ.
SUSAN HOFFINGER, ESQ.
CHRISTOPHER CONROY, ESQ.
BECKY MANGOLD, ESQ.
KATHERINE ELLIS, ESQ.
Assistant District Attorneys
BLANCHE LAW
BY:
TODD BLANCHE, ESQ.
EMIL BOVE, ESQ.
KENDRA WHARTON, ESQ.
NECHELES LAW, LLP
BY: SUSAN NECHELES, ESQ.
GEDALIA STERN, ESQ.
Attorneys for the Defendant
SUSAN PEARCE-BATES, RPR, CSR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter
LAURIE EISENBERG, RPR, CSR
LISA KRAMSKY
THERESA MAGNICCARI
Senior Court Reporters
Susan Pearce-Bates, RPR, CCR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter
New York
Transcript of Trump Manhattan Trial, May 29, 2024
SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK
COUNTY OF NEW YORK CRIMINAL TERM
-
THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK,
PART: 59
Indict. No.
71543-2023
CHARGE
-against-
DONALD J. TRUMP,
DEFENDANT.
BEFORE:
4815
FALSIFYING BUSINESS
RECORDS 1ST DEGREE
JURY TRIAL
X
100 Centre Street
New York, New York 10013
May 29, 2024
HONORABLE JUAN M. MERCHAN
JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT
APPEARANCES:
FOR THE
PEOPLE:
ALVIN BRAGG, JR.,
ESQ.
DISTRICT ATTORNEY, NEW YORK COUNTY
One Hogan Place
New York, New York 10013
BY:
JOSHUA STEINGLASS, ESQ.
MATTHEW COLANGELO,
ESQ.
SUSAN HOFFINGER, ESQ.
CHRISTOPHER CONROY, ESQ.
BECKY MANGOLD, ESQ.
KATHERINE ELLIS, ESQ.
Assistant District Attorneys
BLANCHE LAW
BY:
TODD BLANCHE, ESQ.
EMIL BOVE, ESQ.
KENDRA WHARTON, ESQ.
NECHELES LAW, LLP
BY: SUSAN NECHELES, ESQ.
Attorneys for the Defendant
SUSAN PEARCE-BATES, RPR, CSR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter
LAURIE EISENBERG, RPR, CSR
LISA KRAMSKY
THERESA MAGNICCARI
Senior Court Reporters
Susan Pearce-Bates,
RPR, CCR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter
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