Another Noble Group Ex-CEO Gets $20 Million After Legal Battle

(Bloomberg) -- Noble Group Holdings Ltd., the commodity trader shrunken by years of losses and a multibillion dollar restructuring, has paid $20 million to former Chief Executive Officer Ricardo Leiman.

The payment to Leiman, who left the company in 2011 -- several years before its 2018 restructuring -- was disclosed in a presentation accompanying Noble’s third-quarter results on Friday. It followed a long legal battle concluded in May, when Singapore’s Court of Appeal ruled that Noble had deprived Leiman of entitlements including the right to exercise share options when he left.

When the case was first filed in 2012, Leiman’s restricted shares and share options were worth about $59 million, Bloomberg reported at the time. By the time Noble’s Singapore-listed stock was suspended in 2018, its value had fallen by 99%.

The settlement is a similar size to a roughly $20 million package former co-CEO Jeff Frase received on leaving in 2017, even as Noble slumped to a loss of almost $5 billion.

Leiman declined to comment on the terms of the settlement, saying only that he had no outstanding legal cases against Noble. A spokesperson for the company declined to comment.

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While Noble’s market value once exceeded $10 billion, it has become a shadow of its former self following a restructuring in 2018 that handed control to its creditors. The $20 million payment to Leiman is equal to about 70% of the company’s entire staff bill for the first half of this year, when “human capital costs” totaled $28 million.

Noble’s presentation showed the $20 million payment as a cash outflow during the first half of this year related to the settlement of a legal case involving a former CEO. The size of the payment hadn’t previously been disclosed.

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