Bribery, Fraud & Tax Evasion

Last year, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) began investigating one of the nation's largest hedge funds, Pequot Capitol Management, for possible insider trading. Up until last summer, the inquiry was headed by SEC lawyer Gary Aguirre. His investigation proceeded smoothly, Aguirre claims, until he asked for testimony from former Pequot chairman and Morgan Stanley CEO, John Mack, a top Bush donor. Read More

Among the many superlatives associated with Hurricane Katrina can now be added this one: it produced one of the most extraordinary displays of scams, schemes and stupefying bureaucratic bungles in modern history, costing taxpayers up to $2 billion. Read More

Top contractor Lockheed got contracts larger than budget of Congress, Dept. of Interior Read More

The topic was the largest defense procurement scandal in recent decades, and the two investigators for the Pentagon's inspector general in Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's office on April 1, 2005, asked the secretary to raise his hand and swear to tell the truth. Read More

Two small utilities are set to pay more than $50 million to Enron for electricity that they agreed to buy but that Enron will never deliver, under terms of a settlement that raises larger issues. Read More

Three former top officers of Buca Inc., an operator of Italian restaurants, have agreed to plead guilty to federal fraud charges in connection with a scheme to create false profits for Buca and allow executives to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay for a wide range of expenses including the use of an Italian villa and visits to strip clubs. Read More

Entergy, one of the largest utilities in the U.S., has enjoyed healthy profits since Hurricane Katrina. Yet its New Orleans subsidiary has filed for bankruptcy, and frightened ratepayers with visions of bills bloated to 140% of their pre-storm size. Now the Fortune 500 company is threatening to pull the plug on New Orleans if it doesn't get a $700 million-plus federal bailout it doesn't actually need. Read More

Through a partnership with a smaller, minority-owned company, a sprawling multinational firm whose federal contract for travel trailers was up for rebidding has landed four new deals that could be worth $400 million, federal records show. Read More

A political strategist who left U.S. Rep. Katherine Harris (news, bio, voting record)'s Senate campaign last month said Harris ignored her staff's recommendation to reject a defense contractor's $10 million appropriation request, now being challenged by a congressional watchdog group. Read More

A report released yesterday by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) and Free Press exposes corporate propaganda's infiltration of local television news across the country. Read More