In the first federal ruling to examine the scope of an agency relationship between a publicly traded company and a non-publicly traded company necessary to trigger coverage under the whistleblower protection provision of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, an Eastern District of Pennsylvania judge has allowed a former employee of the non-publicly traded subsidiary of a public company to proceed with his whistleblower suit.
In Wiest v. Lynch, U.S. District Judge Gene E.K. Pratter of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania ruled that plaintiff Jeffrey Wiest sufficiently showed that his former employer, the non-publicly traded Tyco Electronics Corp.—referred to in Pratter’s opinion as “Tyco”—acted as an agent of its publicly traded parent company, Tyco Electronics Ltd.—referred to in the opinion as “Tyco Limited.”
