WILMINGTON, Delaware, Nov 20 (Reuters) - Mark Zuckerberg

and current and former leaders of Meta Platforms ( META ) agreed

to pay the company $190 million to resolve shareholder

allegations that they damaged Meta by violating Facebook users'

privacy, according to a settlement unveiled on Thursday.

The deal ended litigation by shareholders who accused the

Facebook co-founder and other defendants of saddling the company

with billions of dollars in fines and legal costs stemming from

violating privacy regulations.

The agreement fleshes out a deal announced in court on July

17 that ended a scheduled eight-day trial on its second day.

Shareholders were seeking $8 billion from Zuckerberg and 10

current and former directors and officers for allegedly allowing

Facebook users' personal information to be accessed without

their consent.

The defendants had denied all allegations.

The settlement dramatically cut short the trial before a

string of high-profile witnesses took the stand, including

Zuckerberg, billionaire investor and Meta board member Marc

Andreessen, former Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, and

former Facebook board members Peter Thiel, the co-founder of

Palantir Technologies ( PLTR ), and Reed Hastings, the

co-founder of Netflix ( NFLX ).

Facebook in 2021 changed its name to Meta, which is also the

parent company of Instagram and WhatsApp. The company was not a

defendant.

"As one of the largest cash recoveries ever in a derivative

action, this settlement confirms that proper oversight of a

company's compliance obligations is not optional - it's

essential," said Geoff Johnson, an attorney with Scott + Scott,

one of the firms that led the litigation.

Derivative lawsuits recover money from directors and

executives, which is paid to the company and therefore benefits

shareholders indirectly. Boeing directors agreed to a record

settlement in an oversight case in 2021 for $237.5 million. The

settlements in derivative cases are often paid from directors'

and officers' liability insurance policies.

The shareholders who brought the case, including public

employee pension funds, claimed directors failed to oversee

Zuckerberg and Sandberg, who were allowed to run an illegal

data-harvesting enterprise.

The lawsuit was filed in the wake of the scandal surrounding

Cambridge Analytica, a now-defunct British political consulting

firm.

The firm secretly accessed data from tens of millions of

Facebook users to create targeted messages for clients that

included Donald Trump during his successful U.S. presidential

campaign in 2016. Officials from Trump's 2016 campaign have said

Cambridge Analytica played a minor role in the election.

Those revelations led to a record $5 billion fine by the

Federal Trade Commission and a series of other legal

settlements. Zuckerberg was also accused of trading Meta stock

to benefit from inside information.

A judge in 2023 declined to dismiss the lawsuit before trial

and called the allegations "wrongdoing on a truly colossal

scale," but experts said the legal standard meant it was still

going to be a difficult case for investors.

The defendants said the evidence at trial would have

shown that Facebook had robust operations to protect user data.

They accused Cambridge Analytica of deceit.

The oversight allegations are known as Caremark claims,

considered the most difficult to prove under Delaware corporate

law. If plaintiffs had prevailed in the trial, the case would

have been appealed to the Delaware Supreme Court.

"This was the first case to take a Caremark claim to trial,

and, in the process, we sent a clear message that even the most

powerful directors and officers must take their oversight

obligations seriously," said Maxwell Huffman, another Scott +

Scott attorney.