In an agreement with the New York attorney general’s office, CBS and its former president, Les Moonves, will pay $30.5 million. The office claims that the network’s executives collaborated with a Los Angeles police command officer to keep sexual assault charges against Moonves secret.
On Wednesday, the LAPD named the commanding officer as retired Cmdr. Cory Palka, then announced that an inquiry had been launched.
The broadcasting behemoth is required to pay $22 million to shareholders as part of the agreement made public on Wednesday by Attorney General Letitia James, as well as an additional $6 million for programs that address sexual assault and harassment. All of the $2.5 million that Moonves would have to pay will go to helping the stockholders who, according to the attorney general, were first kept in the dark about the accusations.
The attorney general’s office said that at least one of those executives, who was among the few with access to an internal inquiry, engaged in insider trading when he sold millions of dollars’ worth of stock before the allegations against Moonves were made public.
“As a publicly traded company, CBS disregarded its most fundamental obligation to be truthful and open with the general public and investors.” In a statement, James referred to the attempts to deceive investors as “reprehensible,” saying that CBS and Leslie Moonves were “paying millions of dollars for their misconduct today after trying to conceal the truth to protect their fortunes.”
The company that owns CBS, Paramount Global, issued a statement saying it was “pleased to resolve this matter… without any admission of liability or wrongdoing,” adding that the situation “involved alleged misconduct by CBS’s former CEO, who was terminated for cause in 2018 and does not relate in any way to the current company.”
Moonves left CBS on September 9, 2018.
The attorney general’s office described an alleged plan by a Los Angeles captain, to try to conceal the claims against Moonves in a report describing the results of its investigation.
