Law & Regulation

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

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

Repsol, a multinational based in Spain, has brought a class action lawsuit in New York courts against the Argentine government for the re-nationalization of YPF, the former Argentine state oil company. Environmentalists question both parties over the impact of the company. Read More

Over 11,000 academics have pledged to boycott Elsevier, the Dutch publishing giant, for profiting off their work and making it unavailable to the general public. Now Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, plans to turn the world of corporate academic publishing on its head. Read More

Hedge funds were just handed an opportunity to make even more money under a new law signed by President Barack Obama last month. Consumer advocates say that unsophisticated investors may be at risk as a result. Read More