Category: Business & Economy

Note from Corruption Ledger Spotify is a publicly traded company headquartered in Luxembourg. Swedish founders Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon started Spotify as a small start-up in Stockholm, Sweden in 2006.  Job cuts don’t just affect those who are laid off. It creates a culture of fear for remaining employees, who must work additional hours and maneuver to adapt to…

  SINGAPORE – GIC has bought two logistic facilities developed by Japanese real estate developer Daiwa House Industry for an undisclosed amount. The assets in Takatsuki city of Greater Osaka and Tosu city of Greater Fukuoka were completed in 2023 and 2021, said the Singapore sovereign wealth fund on Dec 4. “Both properties have modern building specifications that cater to…

Mercer Financial Advice has been ordered by the Federal Court to pay a $12 million penalty for breaching fee disclosure obligations and for wrongly charging fees to customers, ASIC has reported. “This is a significant penalty for a financial advice provider,” said Sarah Court (pictured above), ASIC deputy chair. “Mercer failed in its obligation to provide fee disclosure statements to…

WASHINGTON: US inspectors announced fines against China-based firms Thursday, as part of a broader effort to hold US-listed Chinese companies up to American auditing standards amid simmering geopolitical tensions. These included PwC affiliates in Hong Kong and China, alongside a Chinese audit company. The $7.9 million in penalties unveiled by the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) represent some of the…

  SINGAPORE – Venture Corporation said on Nov 30 that its board of directors has established a share buyback plan to purchase up to 10 million ordinary shares of the company. This plan was authorised by the board on Nov 29, following the approval of Venture’s shareholders of the share purchase mandate at the annual general meeting on April 27,…

WASHINGTON: The US on Wednesday said it imposed a new round of sanctions on a group of 20 people and firms allegedly involved in a financial facilitation network for the benefit of the Iranian military. The Treasury Department sanctions impact firms and people spanning Hong Kong to the United Arab Emirates. Included in the sanctions package are employees, brokers and…

At the peak of the online shopping season, Canadian e-commerce giant Shopify filed a new lawsuit to take a stand against DMCA abuse. The company filed a complaint at a Florida federal court, accusing an Orlando resident of filing dozens of false takedown notices, allegedly to advance their own commercial interests. Signed into law a quarter century ago, the Digital…

  As China’s embattled shadow banking giant Zhongzhi Enterprise Group faces a criminal probe, lawyers and analysts are assessing the damage to investors. One estimate puts that at about US$56 billion (S$74.9 billion). More than three quarters of investor cash would be lost, with just 100 billion yuan (S$18.7 billion) being recovered from debt of as much as 460 billion…

BOGOTA: Former Colombian president Alvaro Uribe will appear before the attorney general’s office next week over a 1997 paramilitary massacre, authorities said Thursday. While Uribe was governor of the Antioquia department, a group of 150 right-wing paramilitary members killed at least 15 people in the village of El Aro. Last week, paramilitary leader Salvatore Mancuso, at a hearing with Colombia’s…

With Russian tanks and troops descending on Ukraine in early 2022, Cyprus became a hotbed of financial activity. The island country has long been known as an offshore transit point for the fortunes of Russian billionaires, and as sanctions loomed over many of them last year, Cyprus financial services firms fielded a series of urgent demands to transfer funds and…

Malicious actors have been abusing Ethereum’s ‘Create2’ function to bypass wallet security alerts and poison cryptocurrency addresses, which led to stealing $60,000,000 worth of cryptocurrency from 99,000 people in six months. This is reported by Web3 anti-scam specialists at ‘Scam Sniffer,’ who observed several cases of in-the-wild exploitation of the function, in some cases losses incurred by one individual reaching…

Boeing, a prominent aerospace manufacturer and defense contractor, found itself targeted by the Lockbit ransomware group at the end of October. This cybercriminal organization claimed responsibility for infiltrating Boeing’s systems and asserted that it had obtained a substantial amount of sensitive data. The group threatened to disclose this information unless Boeing engaged with them before the initial deadline, initially set…

Portugal’s central bank governor Mário Centeno is facing an ethics review by an independent watchdog after he was proposed as the next prime minister by Socialist premier António Costa, who quit last week over a corruption scandal. Costa’s proposal has triggered a public spat between Centeno and Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, the president who has the power to appoint prime…

Backgrounder. Imran Khan is a former Pakistani cricket player, politician, philanthropist, and prime minister of Pakistan (2018–22). He became a national hero by leading Pakistan’s national team to a Cricket World Cup victory in 1992 and later entered politics as a critic of government corruption in Pakistan. Khan’s calls for investigations into government corruption, along with supporting evidence released in…

The LockBit ransomware gang published data stolen from Boeing, one of the largest aerospace companies that services commercial airplanes and defense systems. Before the leak, LockBit hackers said that Boeing ignored warnings that data would become publicly available and threatened to publish a sample of about 4GB of the most recent files. Backup data published LockBit ransomware has leaked more…

Telecom Italia SpA has agreed to sell its land-line network to KKR & Co. in a government-backed deal valued at around €22 billion ($23.6 billion), according to people familiar with the matter. The phone carrier’s board of directors, after a marathon meeting that started on Friday, approved the grid sale to the US private equity giant on Sunday without making it conditional on…