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Shareholders sue Cambridge Technology

The company is being sued by former shareholders who are alleging fraud and negligent misrepresentation during the company's acquisition of Excell Data.

Kim Girard
Kim Girard has written about business and technology for more than a decade, as an editor at CNET News.com, senior writer at Business 2.0 magazine and online writer at Red Herring. As a freelancer, she's written for publications including Fast Company, CIO and Berkeley's Haas School of Business. She also assisted Business Week's Peter Burrows with his 2003 book Backfire, which covered the travails of controversial Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina. An avid cook, she's blogged about the joy of cheap wine and thinks about food most days in ways some find obsessive.
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Kim Girard
Cambridge Technology Partners is being sued by former shareholders who are alleging fraud and negligent misrepresentation during the company's acquisition of Excell Data, a systems integrator of Microsoft software.

The suit, filed yesterday in United States District Court in Cambridge, Massachusetts, alleges breach of contract, violation of federal securities laws, common law fraud, and negligent misrepresentation in connection with the acquisition.

Cambridge Technology Partners, in a prepared statement, called the claims "without merit" and said the services company intends to "vigorously defend" the lawsuit.

The services and consulting company acquired Bellevue, Washington-based Excell on August 31 for about 1.68 million shares in exchange for all Excell shares.

Under terms of the acquisition agreement, none of the shareholders now suing Cambridge Technology Partners continued working for the company. The former Excell employees are seeking unspecified damages.

Excell was founded in 1991 and had a compound annual growth rate of 120 percent from 1992 through 1997. Through the acquisition of the company, Cambridge Technology Partners aimed to increase its presence in the Bellevue, Washington, Portland, Oregon, and Denver, Colorado, markets by adding approximately 513 employees in those locations.