Lawsuit: Shari Redstone and National Amusements “Caused CBS to Massively Overpay for Viacom”

turns 97 years old in a few weeks. He hasn’t been seen publicly in years. And those people who did see him back then, outside of his immediate family, have said he had little cognitive ability and little awareness of his surroundings. That makes sense, in at least one important way.

When the Viacom–CBS merger closed in December, the combined company’s stock was trading at around $40 per share. It is now trading at around $16.40 per share. The market value of its equity is about $10 billion, making it one of the smallest of what people think of as the important media companies. ViacomCBS is trading at three times its earnings and at about 81% of its book value.

The COVID-19 crisis has merely exacerbated the ViacomCBS decline. Before the full-blown onset of the crisis, in mid-February, the company’s stock was trading at around $35 per share. It got as low as $11.28 a share on March 23, right as the Federal Reserve began its well-documented efforts to prop up the financial markets. CBS’s first-quarter 2020 viewership has also suffered from comparison with a year ago.

Not much has been written about the lawsuit, but, if accurate, it reveals a devastating portrait of the lengths Shari Redstone traveled to get control of both Viacom and CBS and then to force the merger of the two companies and stack the management and board of the combined ViacomCBS with her loyalists—all done while her father was still alive. “The sole reason for the merger”—of Viacom and CBS—“was to protect Shari Redstone’s floundering Viacom investment,” the lawsuit contends.

But after a series of contracts designed to keep Ianniello in place between September 2018—when Moonves left CBS—and the closing of the merger, and which paid him $125 million in 2019 alone, Ianniello changed his tune about Shari. According to the lawsuit, in September 2018, Ianniello let Shari Redstone “know that he was willing to play ball.

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