Bribery, Fraud & Tax Evasion

The UK Serious Fraud Office has notched up another win in the global interest rate setting scandal by sending three Barclays traders to jail. Of the 20 bankers that have been charged to date, five have been found guilty, six have been let go while nine are to face trial. Read More

Bank of America leads the list of companies that have paid over $1 billion in penalties and fines to the U.S. government in the last six years. Violation Tracker, a new corporate misconduct database maintained by Good Jobs First, estimates that the North Carolina bank has paid $56 billion. Read More

The U.S. government is investigating Citadel, a Chicago-based hedge firm and market maker that manages some $25 billion in client money, for allegedly giving smaller investors a bad deal. The Department of Justice wants to know if the firm is taking advantage of the complexity of high-speed trading. Read More

Did a few individual traders in London conspire to rig global interest rates in order to enrich themselves or were they just pawns in an ongoing conspiracy by major banks designed to routinely skim billions from the international financial system? Read More

Unaoil, a lobbying firm based in Monaco, is being investigated by authorities in Australia, the U.K. and the U.S. for allegedly helping companies around the world pay bribes for oil concessions and contracts. Among the companies under scrutiny is Texas-based Kellogg Brown & Root, former subsidiary of Halliburton. Read More

Activists say fines paid by Volkswagen to settle the "Dieselgate" scandal should be paid into a fund to help vulnerable populations like school children and low income communities, as punishment for installing software in some 11 million vehicles to enable the cars to cheat on emissions tests. Read More

Netherlands-based telecommunications giant VimpelCom announced today that it would pay U.S. and Dutch authorities $795 million to end an investigation into bribery in Uzbekistan. While the settlement does not reveal the recipient of the bribes, most sources point to Gulnara Karimova, daughter of the Uzbek president. Read More

A key witness has admitted under oath that he lied on behalf of Chevron, the California oil multinational, when the company sued to overturn a $9.5 billion verdict for pollution of the Ecuadorian Amazon. Read More

Swedish companies have been accused of profiting excessively from the recent influx of refugees to Europe, taking advantage of the government expenditures of some $7 billion to house and support over 150,000 new immigrants this year. Read More

Three major U.S. medical associations - the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Cardiology - have bowed to pressure from activist doctors to stop accepting corporate donations from Coca-Cola. The campaigners say Coke exerted undue influence over the medical groups. Read More