Sears Holdings Corp. and its chief executive, Eddie Lampert, are being sued for allegedly encouraging participants in its 401(k) plan to buy company stock despite well-publicized struggles that have battered Sears shares since 2014, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday. The lawsuit, filed on Friday in Illinois federal court, requested class-action status on behalf of participants in the Sears Holdings Savings Plan, which suffered “tens of millions of dollars of losses” on Sears stockholdings in the past three years. Those losses would have been “minimized or avoided” if plan administrators had stopped offering Sears shares as an investment option sooner, according to the complaint. The 401(k) plan froze purchases of Sears shares at the end of 2016, “too little, too late, to protect a great deal of [the] participants’ retirement savings,” the complaint said. Sears stock lost 80 percent of its value in the three years before the lawsuit.
