Government Investigates Former CBS CEO Mooves

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Jan 11, 5:08PM EST · Published Sep 29, 7:50AM EDT

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Government Investigates Former CBS CEO Mooves — © Neilson Barnard / Getty Images

CBS Corp. (NYSE: CBS) has disclosed more trouble due to sexual harassment charges against its former chief executive officer, Les Moonves. The company got subpoenas from the New York County District Attorney’s Office and the New York City Commission on Human Rights. CBS received another demand on the same issues from the New York State Attorney General’s Office

The CBS board already has two law firms investigating the same allegations about Moonves and “cultural issues at all levels of CBS.”

Moonves’s career has been destroyed, and a possible $120 million severance package almost certainly will not be paid to him if the allegations prove to be accurate.

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CBS also faces numerous class action suits that complain the CBS board should have disclosed the matters regarding Moonves. One, from Pomerantz, reads:

The Complaint alleges that throughout the Class Period, Defendants made materially false and misleading statements regarding the Company’s business, operational and compliance policies. Specifically, Defendants made false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose that: (i) CBS executives, including the Company’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Leslie “Les” Moonves, had engaged in widespread workplace sexual harassment at CBS; (ii) CBS’s enforcement of its own purported policies was inadequate to prevent the foregoing conduct; (iii) the foregoing conduct, when revealed, would foreseeably subject CBS to heightened legal liability and impede the ability of key CBS personnel to execute the Company’s business strategy; and (iv) as a result, CBS’s public statements were materially false and misleading at all relevant times.

The period runs from February 14, 2014, through July 27, 2018, and covers people who bought shares during that time.

The legal charges against CBS continue to grow.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.