INVESTIGATIVE NOTICE: MURRAY, FRANK & SAILER LLP IS INVESTIGATING A POSSIBLE SHAREHOLDER CLASS ACTION AGAINST VITESSE SEMICONDUCTOR CORP - VTSS
New York, NY - June 1, 2006 - Murray, Frank & Sailer LLP is investigating a possible shareholder class action on behalf of anyone who purchased or otherwise acquired securities of Vitesse Semiconductor Corp. (NasdaqNM: VTSS; "Vitesse" or the "Company") between January 1, 2003 and April 26, 2006, inclusive (the "Class Period").
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On April 19, 2006, the Company announced that on April 17, 2006, Louis R. Tomasetta, the Company's Chief Executive Officer, Eugene F. Hovanec, the Company's Executive Vice President and Yatin Mody, the Company's Chief Financial Officer were placed on administrative leave.
Vitesse further announced today that on April 17, 2006, its Board of Directors appointed Chris Gardner as Acting President and Chief Executive Officer. Mr. Gardner joined Vitesse in 1986. He served as Vice President and Chief Operating Officer from November 2000 to June 2002. Since June 2002, Mr. Gardner has served as Vice President and General Manager of the Network Products Division. Mr. Gardner received his B.S.E.E. from Cornell University and his M.S.E.E. from the University of California at Berkeley.
The Company's Board of Directors has appointed a Special Committee of independent directors to conduct an internal investigation relating to past stock option grants, the timing of such grants and related accounting and documentation. The Special Committee is being assisted by independent outside legal counsel. Although the Company is unable to determine at this time whether it will need to restate its financial results for prior periods, this investigation could cause the Company to undertake such a restatement.
By 11:00 a.m., April 19, 2006, the Company’s stock had dropped 19% on trade volume that topped 33 million.
On April 26, 2006, after the close of trading, the Company announced that financial reports for three years ended Sept. 30, 2005 and possibly earlier should no longer be relied upon as accurate, and that the Company would be issuing a restatement. On this news the shares were trading at $2 in the premarket session, down 51 cents, or 20.32 percent, from Wednesday's closing price of $2.51 on the Nasdaq. That is a total 40% drop since the last announcement on April 19, 2006.
Vitesse Semiconductor Corporation engages in the design, development, manufacturing, and marketing of integrated circuits (ICs) for systems manufacturers in the communications and storage industries. The company provides laser drivers, transimpedance amplifiers, and post amplifiers that serve as the physical connection to the fiber optic cable. It offers physical layer devices that convert high-speed analog signals from the physical media devices to digital signals; and involve in clock and data regeneration, and multiplexing/demultiplexing for the fiber channel and gigabit Ethernet markets. The company provides network processors; software-programmable microprocessors for networking and communications functions, such as classification, filtering, policing, grooming, forwarding, and routing; and traffic management ICs that reside on a line card between the network processor and the switch fabric, as well as perform the policing, queuing, and buffering functions. It also offers switches for receiving data from a line card and routing it to its proper destination; enterprise local area network (LAN) products, such as transceivers, switches, and media access controllers that address gigabit Ethernet applications in the LAN; and storage and serial backplane products, such as serialisers and deserialisers, transceivers, retimers, and port bypass circuits, as well as switches, expanders, enclosure management devices, and RAID controllers. The company markets its product in the United States, Japan, Canada, Singapore, Hong Kong, and the United Kingdom. Vitesse Semiconductor was co-founded as Vitesse Electronics Corporation in 1984 by Louis Tomasetta and changed its name to Vitesse Semiconductor Corporation in 1987. The company is headquartered in Camarillo, California.
If you would like to discuss this announcement, or your rights and interests, please contact Bradley P. Dyer of Murray, Frank & Sailer LLP at [email protected].