The defendants in a “fraud on the market” lawsuit should not be permitted at the class certification stage to contest the materiality of their alleged misrepresentations, an investor suing pharmaceutical company Amgen Inc. has told the U.S. Supreme Court.

The high court is set to hear oral argument in the case Nov. 5.  In June it granted a petition for certiorari filed by Amgen and four of its officers, who are accused of misstating the safety of two drugs and thereby inflating the price of the company’s stock.

(Story from Westlaw Journal Securities Litigation & Regulation) (more…)

There are a wide range of Corporate Responsibility-related risks, opportunities and impacts that we need to manage across our business. To help us prioritize the issues that are most important to us and to our stakeholders, in 2011 we conducted an initial materiality assessment.

We went through the following process:

• Reviewed best practice approaches to materiality and the approaches of our peers
• Consulted a cross-section of people from across our business to define a list of material issues and prioritize these into high, medium and low importance
• Presented a draft materiality matrix to the CR Roundtable
• Reframed and repositioned some issues to reflect the Roundtable’s feedback and produce a finalised version of the matrix This year there was no formal input from external stakeholders to our materiality assessment process.

The judgements about the relative importance of issues to stakeholders are therefore based on the knowledge of our internal issue experts. Next year we aim to involve external stakeholders more formally in the process as part of our goal to make it as robust and inclusive as possible.

This was an excerpt from our 2011 Corporate Responsibility Report. You can read more by downloading the full report.