WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court threw out a lower court’s decision and so revived a lawsuit by IBM employees who had invested in company stock. They argued they should be able to sue managers of the company’s retirement fund in stock-drop litigation for not disclosing that the company’s microelectronics business was overvalued.
The issue in the case, cited as Retirement Plans Committee of IBM v. Jander, is whether the fund managers can be held liable under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) for not promptly disclosing problems in the microchip-making division that caused the price of company stock to fall 7 percent. IBM is short for International Business Machines Corp., of Armonk, New York.