Bribery, Fraud & Tax Evasion

Investment Technology Group (ITG), a U.S. stock broker, paid a $20.3 million fine for running a secret operation named Project Omega to take advantage of "dark pools" trading orders made by its clients. Experts say that Barclays and Credit Suisse may also soon pay fines for dark pools trading scams. Read More

British regulators are investigating Soma Oil & Gas, a UK-based company, for allegedly paying bribes to the Somali government in exchange for exploration rights. Under scrutiny is the payment of $580,000 for "capacity building arrangements" at the Ministry of Petroleum in Mogadishu, according to Financial Times sources. Read More

Almost none of the huge amount of money "loaned" to Greece has actually gone there, writes Joseph Stiglitz, former World Bank chief economist. CorpWatch's EuroZone Profiteers report sheds light on how some of it was used to pay off bad loans made by private-sector banks in France and Germany. Read More

Shareholders have demanded that the CEO of Soco International be fired after handwritten receipts for $42,250 in alleged bribes to Congolese army officials were published by Global Witness. At the time, the UK company was exploring for oil in Virunga, a United Nations World Heritage site in eastern Congo. Read More

Traffic International, a Brazilian sports media company, has been named as the source of at least $60 million in bribes paid to Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) officials, the organizers of the World Cup football tournament, to obtain media and marketing rights to international games. Read More

Six major international banks - Bank of America, Barclays, Citibank, JPMorgan Chase, Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and Union Bank of Switerland (UBS) - have agreed to pay $5.6 billion in fines for rigging global foreign exchange markets. Four of the six have pleaded guilty to criminal behavior, an unprecedented admission. Read More

DaVita, a company that provides health care to patients with kidney problems, has agreed to pay $495 million to settle whistleblower complaints that the company conspired to overcharge the U.S. government. This is in addition to the $400 million that the company had to pay out last year. Read More

Deutsche Bank has agreed to pay out a record $2.5 billion fine to settle U.K. and U.S. government investigations into allegations of fixing global interest rates, just months after six other banks paid out $4.3 billion on similar charges. Activists say that the banks should have faced criminal charges. Read More

Ernst & Young, one of the Big Four auditing firms, has agreed to pay a $10 million to New York state to settle a lawsuit for overlooking accounting gimmicks by Lehman Brothers, the defunct Wall Street bank. The scheme allowed Lehman to hide billions of dollars in bad deals. Read More

A cache of secret documents has thrust HSBC, the world's second largest bank, into the limelight for helping international clients dodge taxes. A series of articles published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists is finally pushing reluctant governments to act almost eight years after the original leaks. Read More