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Shareholders sued 120 companies for stock fraud this year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg and the Stanford Law School Securities Class Action Clearinghouse, the lowest total since 1996, a year after Congress passed laws to curb securities-fraud litigation.

The decline might have resulted in part from increased corporate governance rules and fraud prosecutions since 2002. That year, there were 267 stock-fraud lawsuits after an accounting scandal forced Enron to file the second-biggest bankruptcy case in U.S. history. Enron’s collapse led to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which imposed stricter accounting rules on companies.

Washingtonpost: Stock-Fraud Suits at 10-Year Low