Pension Fund Sues Oracle Over Pillar Data Acquisition

Bloomberg on Friday reported that the lawsuit was filed by the City of Roseville Employees’ Retirement System in the Delaware Chancery Court in Wilmington.

The defendants in the lawsuit, which sealed by the Court, also included Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, Oracle President Mark Hurd, and Oracle Chairman Jeff Henley, Bloomberg reported.

In the suit, the City of Roseville Employees’ Retirement System, based in Michigan, accused Oracle's board of breaching its fiduciary duty in its acquisition of Pillar Data.

Oracle in July said it would acquire Pillar Data, a developer of the Axiom storage array line. Ellison was the majority owner of Pillar Data.

The Axiom storage arrays provide application-aware unified SAN and NAS capabilities, and scales both in terms of performance by adding additional storage controllers and NAS, Fibre Channel, and iSCSI modules, and in terms of capacity through additional storage modules.

Oracle at the time did not directly disclose the price it paid to acquire Pillar Data. However, Oracle at that time said Pillar Data owed Ellison and his affiliates a total principal loan amount plus interest of approximately $544 million for amounts borrowed by Pillar Data in prior years.

How much Oracle eventually pays Ellison, his affiliates, and Pillar Data executives will depend on Pillar Data's performance. That determination will not be made until November of 2014.

The City of Roseville Employees’ Retirement System has filed lawsuits in the past against several other IT companies, including Micron Technology, Nokia, Boston Scientific, CSC, and Textron.

Oracle declined to comment on the lawsuit.