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CA in legal tangle over staff bonuses

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CIOL Bureau
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NEW YORK: A group led by Texas investor, Sam Wyly filed a suit against software maker Computer Associates International Inc. that seeks to strengthen a case already filed on behalf of the company against 10 former and current executives.



The latest suit aims to prevent CA from asserting that Wyly and his group, Ranger Governance, broke agreements reached in 2002 when Wyly accepted $10 million from CA in exchange for not launching proxy fights for five years.



Wyly and Ranger say in the suit that CA is trying to stop them from pursuing "valid derivative claims" for the company's benefit against "certain executives who improperly received hundreds of millions of dollars from the company."



A Computer Associates spokesman declined to comment.



The suit, filed in Dallas, seeks a court judgment that Wyly and Ranger have not breached the agreements and that Ranger is free to pursue the derivative suit on behalf of CA.



In that suit filed on June 30 in a New York court, Ranger on behalf of CA wants to recoup more than $1 billion in bonuses from executives of Computer Associates.



CA has been dogged by a long-running criminal probe of its accounting methods.



Companies often oppose shareholders' derivative lawsuits, which are launched on behalf of the companies rather than against them, because of the negative impact on executives and the cost of defending them, legal experts say.

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