Banking, Finance & Services

Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer has agreed to pay a total of $60.2 million in penalties to U.S. government regulators to settle documented charges of bribery in eight countries: Bulgaria, China, Croatia, Czech Republic, Italy, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Serbia. Read More

Kenichi Watanabe and Takumi Shibata, the CEO and chief operating officer of Nomura, have resigned over several recent insider trading scandals at the Japanese multinational conglomerate. The revelations are the latest in a series of events that have shone a welcome spotlight on seamier side of the financial industry. Read More

HSBC, one of the world's largest banks, has been accused of laundering money for Mexican drug cartels. At a hearing conducted by the U.S. Senate earlier this week, David Bagley, HSBC's head of compliance, apologized and resigned. Read More

BlackRock and Two Sigma Investments - both major hedge funds - have been conducting regular private surveys of brokers for wealthy clients. The practice has raised red flags because of Morgan Stanley's role in the Facebook stock market flotation, as well as insider trading scandals at Goldman Sachs. Read More

A record $450 million fine for fixing rates at which banks lend to each other has been levied on Barclays bank in the UK, shining a light into how banks set - and manipulate - rates at which $360 trillion in international deposits are loaned out every day. Read More

Martin Sorrell, CEO of WPP, the global ad agency, was defeated in his attempt to get shareholders to approve his $20 million (£13 million) a year salary. His was at least the 12th in a series of shareholder revolts against excessive compensation this spring. Read More

How Deutsche Bank made its U.S. arm vanish from the records maintained by the Federal Reserve and saved itself from locking up $20 billion in deposits. (Hint: Hire a lobbyist on Capitol Hill) Read More

One rich bank (JP Morgan) lost money to a rich hedge fund (Saba). Surely that is a zero sum game: They swap mansions and yachts, their partners swap diamonds and butlers, and it makes no difference to the rest of us. Or are they robbing us? Read More

A large chunk of the Eurozone bailouts are for speculative schemes that were handed out by banks in just four countries Belgium, France, Germany and the UK. So why are Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain being blamed? And who is really getting bailed out? Read More

Protests at the 2012 annual general meetings of companies may rank as the most diverse, widespread and sizeable in history. They have been bolstered not just by Occupy activists outside but also by institutional investors inside who have started a "shareholder spring" against excessive CEO pay. Read More