Billionaire Barry Diller will pay $480,000 to settle Federal Trade Commission allegations over Coca-Cola stock reporting.
The agency said the media mogul failed several times to report the acquisition of hundreds of thousands of Coca-Cola voting securities between late 2010 and spring 2012. Diller is required to report the acquisitions under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act because he acquired 120,000 shares of Coca-Cola in 2010, which triggered the reporting threshold for holdings of more than $63.4 million.
He has since bought an additional 869,000 of Coca-Cola voting securities.
The FTC said the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act “requires that parties notify the FTC and the Department of Justice of most large transactions that affect commerce in the United States. After doing so, parties must observe a waiting period before closing their transaction, while one of the two agencies determines whether the transaction may result in a substantial lessening of competition.”
The DOJ filed the complaint in U.S. District Court in D.C. on Tuesday.
Diller is the former chairman of Fox Inc. and Paramount Studios and member of Atlanta-based Coca-Cola’s board of directors.
