MetLife Board Dodges Lawsuit Over $500 Million Annuity Error

MetLife Inc.'s board doesn’t have to face oversight claims over the insurer’s practice of downplaying its liabilities by wrongly counting pensioners as dead if they didn’t respond to its letters, instead of consulting official records, a Delaware Chancery Court judge ruled.

The shareholder derivative lawsuit “supports an inference of failure of prudence on the part of the defendants; and a lack of imagination perhaps,” Vice Chancellor Sam Glasscock III wrote Monday.

But “the plaintiffs require too many attenuated inferences to traverse from regulatory guidance and settlements on the part of the company, to bad faith on the part of any ...