U.S. Supreme Court (Photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to use an appeal by Intel Corp. to consider tightening the deadlines for lawsuits over the investments made by worker retirement plans.
Intel is fighting claims by ex-employee Christopher Sulyma that the company made overly risky investments, with too much money in hedge funds and private equity. Intel says the lawsuit was filed after a three-year statute of limitations had expired.
Sulyma, who worked at Intel from 2010 to 2012, had access to electronic documents describing the investments more than three years before he sued. But he says he doesn't recall reading those documents and didn't learn about Intel's hedge-fund and private-equity investments until they became the subject of news reports in 2015, the year he sued in federal court in California.
A U.S. employee-benefit law gives workers three years to sue after they have "actual knowledge" of an alleged violation. In letting Sulyma's suit move forward, a federal appeals court said that provision "means what it says."
"If Sulyma in fact never looked at the documents Intel provided, he cannot have had 'actual knowledge of the breach' because he cannot have been aware that imprudent investments were made and that other Intel fiduciaries were failing to monitor or remedy that imprudence," the three-judge panel said.
