As reported August 31, 2023, Tobias Read, State Treasurer and Secretary of State candidate, is responsible for the Oregon Public Employee Retirement Fund (OPERF) investing approximately $5.2 million in 150,146 shares of Fox Class A stock and 76,169 shares of Fox Class B stock. A joint Oregon Department of Justice / Oregon Treasurer’s Office investigation launched earlier this year found that Fox’s management on behalf of the company harmed investors.

Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum filed a stockholder derivative lawsuit against the board of directors of Fox Corporation, the corporate parent of Fox News, for breach of fiduciary duty. She claims, “The board of Fox Corporation took a massive risk in pursuing profits by perpetuating and peddling known falsehoods. The directors’ choices exposed themselves and the company to liability and exposed their shareholders to significant risks.”

Read told the House Committee on Emergency Management, General Government, and Veterans in February, that OPERF was the “#1 performing fund in fiscal year 2022” and over the past 20 years. How did OPERF out perform the market? Divest Oregon reported that the industry publication, Pensions and Investments states, “OPERF did better while other state funds had negative returns, not because of doing better in publicly traded equities (stocks), which lost money even for OPERF (-13.3%) -- but because of its relative overweight of high risk “alternative” funds. 60% of OPERF is now held through alternative private contracts, such as investments in private equity, hedge funds, commodities, and real estate / infrastructure, with only around a quarter in lower risk publicly traded equities. This level of high-risk private investment is almost twice as high as most other state pension plans (34%%).” What happened to fiduciary responsibility?

Rosenblum says, "Fox News pushed narratives that appealed to their audience regardless of the facts, Fox’s Board should have been especially sensitive to risks of defamation. Yet, Fox’s business model is to promote false claims, including that murdered Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich provided hacked emails to WikiLeaks, and continuing through false claims that election technology companies U.S. Dominion, Inc. and Smartmatic USA Corp. rigged the 2020 presidential election."

And what does controversial reporting have to do with investment decisions? Seth Rich truth still isn’t settled with Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh claiming Rich was the source of DNC emails for Wikileaks. Fox News did settle a lawsuit for alleged defamation against Dominion for $787 million, somewhat short of the $1.6 billion case. That was in April 2023, but Read should have been investigating Fox returns and volatility prior to its major stock drop in May 2022.

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A D V E R T I S E M E N T

The lawsuit, to which the New York City Pension Funds is co-plaintiff, also alleges that Fox made no good-faith efforts to monitor for or mitigate defamation risk, unlike effectively every other major media organization in the country.

“Our responsibility to safeguard the retirement investments of Oregon’s public servants is of the utmost importance,” said Treasurer Tobias Read, who is a member of the Oregon Investment Council, which sets state investment policy. “We aim to hold Fox’s board of directors, including Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, accountable for their decisions. We believe that this action is necessary in fulfilling our obligation to our beneficiaries.”

Likewise, it is the voter’s responsibility in November 2024, to investigate and hold Tobias Read accountable for his fiduciary duty.


--Donna Bleiler

Post Date: 2023-09-15 12:11:13

Last Update: 2023-09-14 16:19:30