Amazon Board Sued by Shareholder Over Blue Origin Launch Contracts for Project Kuiper

An Amazon shareholder has filed a lawsuit towards founder Jeff Bezos and the Amazon board alleging administrators failed to completely vet a choice to award launch contracts for the corporate’s Project Kuiper satellite tv for pc challenge to Blue Origin, Bezos’s area firm.

The lawsuit filed by Cleveland Bakers and Teamsters Pension Fund earlier this week claims that the Amazon board awarded contracts value billions of {dollars} to Blue Origin and didn’t think about rival Elon Musk-owned SpaceX in its place launch supplier regardless of its monitor file.

Amazon’s Project Kuiper is a deliberate community of over 3,000 satellites designed to beam broadband web to distant areas. That makes it a rival to Musk’s Starlink.

Asked concerning the lawsuit, an Amazon spokesperson stated in an e mail to Reuters: “The claims in this lawsuit are completely without merit, and we look forward to showing that through the legal process.”

Cleveland Bakers and Teamsters Pension Fund, a multi-employer fund, stated in its submitting that the launch contracts have been the second-largest capital expenditure in Amazon’s historical past on the time. Amazon’s largest acquisition is its $13.7 billion (almost Rs. 1,13,320 crore) deal to purchase Whole Foods in 2017. 

Amazon has already paid about $1.7 billion (almost Rs. 14,050 crore) to the three launch suppliers within the challenge, together with $585 million (almost Rs. 4,850 crore) to Blue Origin straight, the lawsuit states, including that the corporate has not but launched a prototype of its Kuiper satellite tv for pc into orbit.

Project Kuiper will start mass-producing the satellites later this 12 months and beta testing with industrial clients in 2024, Amazon stated earlier this 12 months. 

The 2024 deployment goal would preserve Amazon on monitor to meet a regulatory mandate by the FCC to launch half its total Kuiper community of three,236 satellites by 2026.

The pension fund seeks unspecified damages and authorized charges, based on a lawsuit filed on August 28 within the Delaware Court of Chancery. 

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