Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com, February 4 (Xinhua)-- the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced Friday that Activision Blizzard has agreed to pay $35 million (currently about 236 million yuan) to settle an investigation into the company's handling of a wide range of allegations of workplace harassment and discrimination.

Activision Blizzard has faced workplace misconduct complaints that have "not been collected or analyzed for disclosure purposes" since at least 2018, SEC said. As a result, Activision Blizzard management "lacks sufficient information to understand the number and substance of employee complaints about workplace misconduct" and is therefore unable to warn investors of any potential business risks posed by these complaints.

In addition, SEC found that the wording in the company's separation agreement violated the SEC whistleblower protection rules, which required former employees to notify the company when they received requests for information from the committee or other investigative bodies such as NLRB.

Activision Blizzard spokesman Joe Christinat also shared with us some of the SEC findings, pointing out that SEC actually found no evidence of Activision Blizzard's enforcement of the notification terms. "We have settled the matter amicably and, as admitted, we have strengthened the disclosure process for workplace reports and updated our departure contract language."

In other words, Activision Blizzard had to pay a fine of $35 million as a result of the investigation, eliminating the need to acknowledge or deny SEC's findings. CTOnews.com cautioned that despite the hefty fine, it accounted for less than 0.4% of Activision's $8.8 billion in annual revenue (as of 2021), so the impact on the company's profits could be minimal.

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