Carnival Corporation

On April 16, 2020, when the Company still had at sea two of its cruise ships, Bloomberg Businessweek published an article titled “Carnival Executives Knew They Had a Virus Problem, But Kept the Party Going.”  The article stated that Carnival may have failed to effectively protect its passengers from COVID-19 on a series of cruise voyages, and indeed continued to operate new cruise departures despite its knowledge that the threat posed by COVID-19 had materialized on its ships and was likely to proliferate further. 

On this news, the Company’s share price fell $0.53 per share, or over 4%, to close at $11.85 per share on April 16, 2020.

Then, on May 1, 2020, The Wall Street Journal published an article titled “Cruise Ships Set Sail Knowing the Deadly Risk to Passengers and Crew.”  The article detailed how cruise ships, particularly Carnival ships, facilitated the spread of COVID-19, and provided new facts on early warning signs Carnival and its affiliated cruise lines possessed and the Company’s disclosure failures.  Further, the article also noted that The House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure had requested documents from Carnival related “to Covid-19 or other infectious disease outbreaks aboard cruise ships” and that testimony from a different investigation in Australia exposed that Carnival and its affiliated cruise lines may have misled shore officials by concealing those exhibiting COVID-19 symptoms before docking. 

On this news, the Company’s share price fell $1.97 per share, or over 12%, to close at $13.93 per share, thereby injuring investors.

The complaint alleges that throughout the Class Period, defendants made false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose: (1) that the Company’s medics were reporting increasing events of COVID-19 illness on the Company’s ships; (2)  that Carnival was violating port of call regulations by concealing the amount and severity of COVID-19 infections on board its ships; (3) that in responding to the outbreak of COVID-19, Carnival failed to follow the Company’s own health and safety protocols developed in the wake of other communicable disease outbreaks; (4) by continuing to operate, Carnival ships were responsible for continuing to spread COVID-19 at various ports throughout the world; and (5) that as a result of the foregoing, Defendants’ positive statements about the Company’s business, operations, and prospects, were materially misleading and/or lacked a reasonable basis.