Shareholders have filed two lawsuits over Irvine-based Gateway Inc.’s pending sale to Acer Inc. of Taiwan.
The suits take issue with Gateway’s $710 million sale price.
Gateway once was valued in the billions, before the tech bubble burst and the company lost ground to bigger rivals.
In a class action suit filed a few days after the Acer deal was announced in August, stockholders and their lawyers alleged that the sale price is “inadequate and unfair.”
The lawsuit charges that Gateway directors “breached their fiduciary duties to stockholders” by approving the buyout and that the transaction is “both unfair and coercive to the public stockholders,” according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
The 25 shareholders who filed the suits aren’t named.
The suits are unlikely to derail the deal, unless Gateway’s biggest shareholders start to take issue with the price of the deal. There’s been no indication of that so far.
Big shareholders include company founder Ted Waitt and institutional investor Harbinger Capital Partners LLC.
