The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit has upheld the dismissal of a securities class action against Duratek, Inc., a Columbia, Md.-based company that disposes of radioactive waste materials for nuclear facililties. The opinion can be found here.
Any securities litigation opinion from the Fourth Circuit has the potential to be big news, because the court has never decided whether recklessness suffices to meet the scienter requirement for 10b-5 actions and, correspondingly, what a plaintiff must plead to satisfy the PSLRA’s heightened pleading standards for scienter. But no luck today. Duratek is a per curiam opinion and simply holds that “even under the lenient Second Circuit standard” the complaint failed to adequately plead scienter.
The 10b-5 Daily 