The Cockroaches Just Saw the Bathroom Light Come On
David Zaslav and the Warner Brothers Discovery CFO are being sued by the Collinsville Police Pension Board.
The press is all tickled about Zaslav being named in a lawsuit because he has nuked a number of Woke projects as part of a writedown package for the IRS.
This is actually a lot more important than it would appear on the face of it.
First of all, if you are a pension fund then you are looking for stocks that are low risk but are a good bet to go up in value, and you want them to pay dividends. The smart ones tend to be very conservative fiscally. They don’t take big risks. And they invest on the basis of due diligence research. These guys do go through all the documentation that the company provides.
Now granted these investment projections provided by the company in question are given to sunny optimism but there is a difference between that and fraud. If you cooked the books on the investor documentation, then you have committed fraud.
A pension fund is not some angry celebrity or SJW activist organization (generally). These organizations don’t sue over butt-hurt feelings. They sue over corporate malfeasance.
Here is the super important part: They are suing over the number of streamers that HBOmax claims it had when Discovery and Warner Brothers merged because originally the pension fund was invested in Discovery. Discovery was indeed a healthy company at the time the investment was made, it was marrying it to Warner Brothers that damaged the value.
Is Zaslav going to be hurt? Very doubtful from what I’ve been told. This was just a necessary first step in legally redirecting the investor’s ire to where it rightfully lay: AT&T.
Ma Bell was the owner of the company when the decision to cook the books on subscriber numbers was made. Zaslav wasn’t an employee of the company at the time
Darkings: Why is any of this the big deal you think it is?
Dark Herald: Because ALL of the studios have been cooking the books.
Every single studio with a streaming service has reported subscriber numbers that have no basis in reality. You have huge numbers of subscribers that have paid nothing for their subscriptions. You have vast numbers of subscribers that have never once viewed their service. You actually have an incredible amount subscribers who would be surprised as hell to find out they were subscribers in the first place. That I had both Apple TV+ and Paramount Plus was news to me.
Granted Warner Media was worse about this practice than the others because they already had things like HBO Now and HBO Go that were concurrently listed as HBOmax subs. There were a few other things like DC’s streaming service and CrunchyRoll that got rolled in as well.
Regardless, the important part is when this gets redirected to ATT and doesn’t get thrown out of court, that is when the floodgate of class action lawsuits is going to start. And not just against AT&T but against ALL of the major studios.
Yep, to include Disney.
Get your popcorn ready.
Okay, I’m done here.
