Bloomberg Law: UBS Whistleblower’s Retaliation Case Taken Up by Supreme Court
This article features Government Accountability Project and was originally published here.
The US Supreme Court agreed to examine whether a former UBS Securities LLC research strategist suing the company for allegedly firing him for whistleblowing must prove that he was intentionally retaliated against.
The justices on Monday granted Trevor Murray’s bid to review a US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit decision overturning a $1.7 million jury verdict against UBS Securities and parent UBS AG in his whistleblower suit.
The Second Circuit found that the whistleblower protection provisions of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act require Murray to prove that the bank acted with retaliatory intent.
This decision not only raised a whistleblower’s burden of proof under the statute, but cuts directly against the holdings of the Tenth, Ninth, Fifth, and Fourth circuits, Murray’s Supreme Court petition said. Those courts have held that whistleblowers need only show that their protected disclosure was a contributing factor to their employer’s adverse action.
The Supreme Court must resolve this circuit split because any uncertainty in the law’s anti-retaliation provision undermines its purpose of providing uniform protection to corporate whistleblowers, Murray told the justices. Whistleblower suits “cannot...
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