Banking, Finance & Services
Two law firms representing former employees of Washington Mutual Inc. in California, New York and Illinois have sued the Seattle-based thrift, accusing the company of violating labor laws by failing to pay overtime and the federal minimum wage.
JP Morgan Chase is expected to announce over $600 million in penalties and repayments for allegedly cheating customers in energy markets in California and Michigan. This just after Barclays bank paid out $470 million for manipulating electricity rates. Now Goldman Sachs is under scrutiny for possibly manipulating aluminum prices.
Former managers working for Custer Battles, a high-profile private security company in Iraq, are accusing the firm of using companies in the Cayman Islands and other "tax haven" countries to fraudulently overcharge on government contracts by tens of millions of dollars.
A former broker with the Bank of America Corporation who was acquitted in June on 29 of 33 criminal charges linked to improper mutual fund trading reached a separate settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission today.
Federal prosecutors are suing Bank of America for selling fraudulent loans to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, two government-sponsored mortgage finance companies. The government alleged that the multinational sold over $1 billion in bad mortgages that led to numerous foreclosures.
A number of safari companies in Africa used Mossack Fonseca, a Panamanian law firm, to evade taxes on income from foreign clients, according to data from the 'Panama Papers' a leaked cache of 11.5 million documents revealed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).
Former Cendant Corp. Vice Chairman E. Kirk Shelton was sentenced Wednesday to 10 years in prison for his role in an accounting scandal that cost investors more than $3 billion.
Dalla Al Baraka, a major Saudi conglomerate, has acquired two million acres of farmland in eastern Sudan, to produce food for export. While the investors are hoping to wean Saudi Arabia off imports from South America, such agreements have also caused concern among local Sudanese farmers.
The majority of the U.S. Congress took no action at all in 2014 in favor of holding corporations accountable and reining in corporate power - scoring a zero on the newly released Corporate Accountability Coalition (CAC) Congressional Report Card.
In the last two years, Robert K. Steel has been co-chairman of one commission that claimed heavy-handed regulation was stanching financial innovation and another that argued that hedge funds could police themselves.