Editor's note: This story was originally published by The Florida Trib.
Florida Power & Light’s parent company, NextEra, agreed to a $150 million proposed settlement that would close the book on a class-action lawsuit that accused the company’s leaders of making misleading statements several years ago while they navigated a series of high-profile controversies throughout Florida.
It would be the largest settlement for a securities fraud lawsuit in decades in the Southern District of Florida, an attorney representing the lead plaintiffs told U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon in court filings posted late Monday.
The proposed settlement comes at a critical time for NextEra as it moves to acquire Dominion Energy, a blockbuster merger that would make the Florida-based company the world’s largest regulated power company.
The suit had already attracted renewed and national scrutiny of public controversies that have dogged the company for years.
The lawsuit, which had two Florida pension funds as the lead plaintiffs, centered on a wide range of alleged misdeeds uncovered by Florida newspapers years ago, including the involvement of FPL’s outside political consultants in efforts to warp Florida elections through the use of “ghost” candidates, use of dirty tricks to acquire Jacksonville’s city-owned electric utility, surveillance of a journalist and attempts to control media coverage.
NextEra, and several current and former executives who were named as defendants, “specifically deny having engaged in any wrongdoing whatsoever,” the proposed settlement says.
There are some 200,000 investors potentially eligible to receive a portion of the $150 million payment, according to court filings. The lead plaintiffs in the case are the City of Hollywood Police Officers Retirement System and the Pembroke Pines Firefighters & Police Officers Pension Fund.
The lawsuit was once life support: In 2024, Cannon dismissed it, finding that the lead investors had failed to demonstrate that any of the company’s statements during a maelstrom of news coverage about those controversies was sufficiently misleading. But a panel of 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judges resurrected the suit late last year in an opinion that seemed taken aback by the scope of the allegations.
“The complaint has it all: corporate malfeasance, bribery, off-the-books recordkeeping, surveilling journalists, creating ‘ghost’ candidates, corrupting independent media outlets, and a failed acquisition that spiraled into two federal indictments,” the appeals judges said.
“When reporters began to uncover traces of the alleged conspiracy, NextEra and FPL executives were quick to put the claims to rest … But after some time, leadership began to backpedal.”
That backpedaling, the pension funds argued, caused NextEra’s stock to sink more than 8%.
A key episode in the lawsuit is NextEra’s January 25, 2023, announcement that Eric Silagy, FPL’s CEO, was retiring — an abrupt development that utility analysts found unexpected — as well as “unscheduled disclosures about potential legal and reputational risk” that stemmed from some of the allegations that had run in Florida newspapers, which FPL leaders had previously denied.
The pension fund’s attorneys told Cannon the settlement was necessary because of the risks of continued litigation and “an assessment of confidential confirmatory discovery
materials.”
Disclosure: The Florida Trib’s executive editor, Nate Monroe, was the journalist whom FPL and Matrix are alleged to have surveilled. He is also the author of several past columns in The Florida Times-Union that are at issue in this lawsuit and which FPL has criticized in the past.
Nate Monroe is Executive Editor of The Florida Trib. He has been a journalist in the Southeast for the past 15 years. Most recently, he wrote a column about Florida for the USA Today Network. He was previously a metro columnist, beat reporter and investigative reporter for the Florida Times-Union in Jacksonville, where he focused on covering the largest municipal government in Florida. Prior to arriving in Jacksonville in 2013, Nate was a reporter for newspapers in the Florida Panhandle and South Louisiana.
Nate's work has won local, state and national awards and led to federal convictions, voter-led reforms, and other significant impacts.
You can reach him at nate.monroe@floridatrib.org.
