Money & Politics

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

President Barack Obama personally helped Shell obtain authorization to drill for oil in Alaska, according to a new article in the New York Times. This comes a day afer activists launched two reports on the environemental impact of the drilling plans at the company's annual meeting in the Hague. Read More

Jean-Luc Dehaene, a Member of the European Parliament from Belgium, recently accepted shares worth $4.2 million in the company that makes Budweiser and Stella Artois. What's remarkable is that he forgot to mention this as a potential conflict of interest. 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

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

Eduardo Castro-Wright, the former CEO of Walmart Stores USA, has been accused of orchestrating a $24 million bribery scheme to expand the company's presence in Mexico between 2002 and 2005. The alleged scheme involved a series of payoffs to Mexican city governments, according to an investigation by the New York Times Read More

Should lobbyists for biotech and food companies make the rules on what kind of food you have in your kitchen? Meet Mella Frewen, Suzy Renckens and Harry Kuiper: Three examples of how the industries take advantage of the European Food Safety Agency(EFSA) failure to properly regulate conflicts of interest. Read More

Greg Smith, a Goldman Sachs employee in London, has quit the company with a fiercely critical op-ed in the New York Times in which he accuses the Wall Street investment bank of losing its moral compass. Read More

The World Trade Organization ruled that U.S. planemaker Boeing received $5.3 billion in illegal government subsidies over a quarter-century. Airbus and Boeing have both complained to the WTO that the other is receiving state aid. They are locked in a long-running trade dispute over a market believed to be worth more than $3 trillion over the next decade. Read More

Two Spanish lawyers have launched a campaign on social networking sites to prise out information about Euribor, the reference interest rate used for calculating mortgage payments in Spain, and to draw attention to the lack of transparency surrounding the way the rate is set. Read More