The executive vice president and CFO of Bed Bath & Beyond (BBBY), who took his own life by jumping from a Tribeca skyscraper on Sept. 2, had been facing a $1.2 billion stock suit since late August over allegedly inflating the company’s share value.
A group of shareholders claiming a loss of around $1.2 billion sued the company’s CFO Gustavo Arnal and majority shareholder Ryan Cohen, who is also a billionaire investor and GameStop chairman, for accusations of artificially inflating the firm’s stock price in a “pump and dump” scheme.
The class-action suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Aug. 23—11 days prior to Arnal’s death—was first reported by the Daily Mail. It claims that Cohen had approached Arnal about his plan to control shares of Bed Bath & Beyond and from which they could both profit—before Arnal sold off his shares at a higher price after the scheme….