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Old 9th Feb 2021, 13:02
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WillowRun 6-3
 
Join Date: Jul 2013
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New details emerge about Boeing Board and CEO

Wall Street Journal today (Feb. 9 2021) - headline & sub-head:
"Boeing Board Draws Fire on CEO - Shareholders in suit say directors failed to challenge Muilenburg on postcrash media plan"
[by-line in WSJ, Andy Pasztor, Andrew Tangel]

One would guess, with some confidence, this is a shareholder derivative action. Your friendly neighborhood SLF/attorney has not (so far) found a way to access the court filings of the Delaware state court in which the case is pending. Regardless, some comments here may be worth the time to read them.

The lawsuit was originally filed with some or perhaps nearly all quotations and related information from Boeing internal documents blacked out ("redacted"). But the WSJ filed some sort of petition or request to the court for release of more information, and indeed the court granted the publication's request. In the news article today (all of the information about the case in this post is derived from the article) there is an interesting quotation from a court official. Here it is, as in the article:
Morgan Zurn, vice chancellor of the Delaware state court, said in her Feb. 1 order that Boeing’s internal “communications are at the very heart of this board oversight case.” Saying that little had been revealed about how Boeing’s board responded to the MAX crashes, she added: “The public interest favors disclosure.”
As noted in previous posts about the 737 MAX legal matters, a strong case can be articulated for the same logic applying to documents submitted to FAA for its review and decision about lifting the grounding order.

More broadly, the article paints what can only be a head-shaking-causal-factor with regard to Boeing's activities (to apply a completely bloodless word) in the time period between the two crashes, and in the early aftermath of the second. Some of the internal communications are, or would be, comical - if not for the tragic loss of life. Case in point: an internal communication excoriating the Wall Street Journal over reporting, early on, about how the MCAS system was not in the FCOMs, not disclosed to pilots. Comical, if not horrifying first.

In this SLF/atty's career time I've given a few presentations to boards, and I could see starting a presentation slide deck with a plain, simple .... or possibly simplistic .... attention-focusing title. But this paragraph, by which the article concludes, leaves me speechless ... ... ... for now anyway:
In April 2019, vice presidents in charge of engineering and safety for the commercial aircraft unit provided their first report directly to the board, according to the suit: “The presentation opened with a primer titled: ‘What is Certification?’”
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