A New Jersey court this week ordered Holtec International, Jupiter, Fla., and its former finance chief to try to settle the latter’s lawsuit about the company’s alleged attempts to mislead an investor.
The Superior Court of New Jersey in Camden County sent the parties to mediation in a Nov. 20 order. Holtec and Kevin O’Rourke, the former chief financial officer who sued the company in June for allegedly planning to lie about its value to Korea’s Hyundai Engineering and Construction Co., have two weeks to pick a mediator.
If the parties do not agree on someone to mediate the court-ordered settlement negotiations, the court will pick a mediator for them, according to the order published Monday.
O’Rourke had worked for Holtec for about a year when the company fired him in 2022. He alleged that this was because he refused to work on what he called a “false and misleading” draft investor prospectus intended for Hyundai. Hyundai announced it would financially back Holtec’s planned small fleet of modular reactors in May, about a month before O’Rourke sued.
Among other things, O’Rourke alleged that Holtec was overly optimistic about the profit prospects for its proposed interim storage facility for spent fuel in New Mexico. O’Rourke said the company wanted to pitch the facility to Hyandai as a money maker when Holtec’s internal projections showed the facility would lose hundreds of millions of dollars in its first five years of operations.
Since O’Rourke filed his lawsuit, a federal court has ruled that commercially operated interim storage facilities are illegal. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has asked the court for a rehearing on the issue.
Holtec, for its part, has said that the prospectus O’Rourke worked on was a draft that would not have been shown to any potential investor before it was vetted by an outside investment bank.
Holtec also described O’Rourke to the state court as an “erratic and hostile” employee.
