By Tom Hals
WILMINGTON, Delaware (Reuters) – Former Meta Platforms (NASDAQ: ) COO Sheryl Sandberg was fined by a court on Tuesday for deleting emails related to litigation over Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, despite being told to preserve the messages.
The judge, Vice Chancellor Travis Laster, of the Delaware Chancery Court, said the evidence showed Sandberg used a personal account under an alias and deleted messages that were likely relevant to the shareholder lawsuit.
The sentence will make it harder for Sandberg to tell her side of the story and avoid accountability in an eight-day non-jury trial scheduled for April. The judge also ordered her to pay costs associated with a motion for sanctions filed by shareholders, which includes the massive California Teachers Retirement System known as CalSTRS.
“Because Sandberg selectively deleted items from her Gmail account, it is likely that the most sensitive and trusted exchanges disappeared,” Laster wrote in his opinion published Tuesday.
Meta and Sandberg’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Sandberg claimed she was accommodating about the personal account and rarely used it for work, and when she did, other messages were copied so the information was preserved.
Laster imposed a higher standard of “clear and convincing evidence,” rather than a “preponderance” of the evidence, for Sandberg’s affirmative defense, which is her arguments and evidence why she should not be held liable.
The case was launched in 2018, when it emerged that Facebook provided access to the data of millions of users to Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy that worked for Donald Trump’s successful 2016 US presidential campaign.
Shareholders sued the company’s directors and officers for allegedly harming investors by repeatedly violating the Federal Trade Commission’s 2012 consent order on user data protection.
Shareholders also say the company’s board of directors agreed to pay a larger $5 billion fine to the FTC in 2019 to avoid personal liability for founder Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg is expected to be deposed for a second time before the trial begins, according to court records.
In 2023, Laster refused to dismiss the lawsuit, which he said was “a case involving alleged wrongdoing of truly colossal proportions.”
Shareholders also asked Laster to punish Jeffrey Zients, who was former President Joe Biden’s chief of staff and who also used and deleted personal emails while on Meta’s board. The judge said Zients’ messages were less relevant because he joined Meta’s board in 2018, following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and was not an employee of the company.
