Category: corporate corruption

The US Supreme Court rejected Wednesday the claim of sovereign immunity by a Turkish bank accused of violating Iran sanctions, in a case that has added tensions to ties between Washington and Ankara.

Halkbank was hit with US criminal charges in 2019 that it took part in a yearlong scheme to launder billions of dollars worth of Iranian oil and natural gas proceeds, violating sanctions on Iran.

The funds were used to buy gold and the transactions were disguised as food and medicine purchases in order to fall under a humanitarian exemption to the sanctions, according to court documents.

As part of the scheme, Halkbank allegedly used front companies to funnel $20 billion to Iran, including $1 billion through the US financial system, the US Justice Department said.

The United States charged the bank with six counts of fraud, money laundering, and sanctions offenses, calling it one of the most serious sanctions-breaking cases it has seen.

LOS ANGELES – A former doctor has been sentenced to 84 months in federal prison for scheming to defraud private insurance companies and the Tricare health care program for U.S. military service members by fraudulently submitting nearly $120 million in claims related to the 1-800-GET-THIN Lap-Band surgery business, the Justice Department announced today.

Julian Omidi, 54, of West Hollywood, was sentenced Monday evening by United States District Judge Dolly M. Gee.

Judge Gee also sentenced Surgery Center Management LLC (SCM), an Omidi-controlled Beverly Hills-based company, to five years’ probation. A separate hearing on restitution and forfeiture in this case, along with SCM’s fine, is expected in the coming weeks. 

UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is under investigation over allegations he failed to disclose shares his wife owns in a child care business that stands to benefit from his government’s budget, a parliamentary watchdog disclosed. Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards Daniel Greenberg opened an inquiry last week for possible violations of the code of conduct that calls on members to be “open and frank” in declaring relevant financial interests, according to an update given to members of Parliament who returned Monday…

It doesn’t look like Fox News is going to get away with badmouthing Dominion Voting Systems for weeks following Donald Trump’s unsurprising loss in the 2020 election. Evidence already handed over to Dominion in its libel lawsuit shows many Fox News executives — as well as anchors and commentators — were aware the claims were false but chose to give them airtime anyway.   That led to the recent decision in a Delaware state court where the judge made two…

Various treaties and multi-national proposals to combat cybercrime have been around for years. I’m not exaggerating. These have been floating around for more than a decade. (Do you want to feel old? This cybercrime treaty proposal would be old enough to legally obtain a social media account in the United States if it were still viable.)

The UN has been pushing its own version. But its idea of “crime” seems off-base, especially when it’s dealing with a conglomerate of countries with varying free speech protections. The “Cybercrime Treaty” proposed by the UN focuses on things many would consider ugly, distasteful, abhorrent, or even enraging. But it’s not things most people consider to be the sort of “crimes” a unified world front should be addressing — not when there’s plenty of financially or personally damaging cybercrime being performed on the regular.

Prague, April 12 (CTK) – Accusations were levelled against some other people, including former deputy Marek Snajdr (Civic Democratic Party, ODS), in the Dosimeter corruption case, the servers Seznam Zpravy and Denik N write today, referring to unnamed sources close to the investigation. The new accusations relate to the part of the scandal regarding the General Health Insurance Company (VZP). Snajdr worked as a deputy health minister and a member of VZP board of directors. The servers differ on the…

The boss of one of the UK’s largest business groups has been fired over complaints about his behaviour at work. Tony Danker, who will leave the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) following an investigation over his conduct towards several employees, said he was “shocked” by the sacking. Three other CBI employees have also been suspended pending a probe into other allegations, the group said. It is also liaising with the police who are looking into the claims. Detective Chief Superintendent…

One of the most notorious privacy-breaching tech companies in operation, Clearview AI, has, according to its CEO, scraped 30 billion social media photos, packaged and curated them, and passed them along to the surveillance state authorities to do with what they will (in the dark, with no oversight, naturally, as the Founders warned such authorities would if left unchecked). Clearview’s collaboration with law enforcement reportedly includes handing over information to help identify and prosecute the January 6 “insurrectionists” currently being…

Disgraced Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes has been rebuffed in her attempt to stay out of federal prison while she appeals her conviction for the fraud she committed while overseeing a blood-testing scam.

Almost 6 in 10 U.S. adults in a new poll report they’re living paycheck-to-paycheck amid an economic landscape fraught with inflation and recession fears.

A CNBC-Momentive survey on financial confidence found that 58 percent of Americans say they’re living paycheck-to-paycheck, and that 70 percent said they feel stressed about their personal finances.

Nearly 80 percent of respondents making less than $50,000 and 74 percent making between $50,000 and $99,999 said they’re stressed about their finances. And even among those making $100,000 or more, 57 percent still said they’re stressed.

Nearly 80 percent of respondents making less than $50,000 say they’re living paycheck-to-paycheck, compared to just 32 percent of those making $100,000 or more.

Calls to break up Big Ag have resurfaced after a large egg producer in the U.S. announced windfall profits. A March 28 press release by Cal-Maine Foods said the Mississippi-based egg producer recorded a total revenue of $997.5 million – a 109 percent increase – for the quarter ending Feb. 25. Cal-Maine Foods’ profit for the same period shot up by 718 percent to $323.2 million.

“Our results are reflective of a dynamic market environment with higher average selling prices and favorable demand,” said Cal-Maine President Sherman Miller. “Elevated market pricing continues, primarily due to the impact of the ongoing epidemic of highly pathogenic avian influenza, which has significantly reduced the nation’s egg-laying capacity.”

“U.S. egg inventories were 29 percent lower in the final week of December 2022 than at the beginning of the year,” said the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It added that more than 43 million egg-laying hens were lost to either the avian flu itself or culling measures to stop the disease since the outbreak began in February 2022. (Related: Government says “bird flu” responsible for rising egg prices.)

When KPMG LLP gave Silicon Valley Bank a clean bill of health just 14 days before the lender went under, the Big Four audit firm pointed to potential losses on loans to its customers as one of its so-called critical audit issues. But the audit opinion didn’t mention what really brought the bank down: its unrealized losses on bonds and its ability to sustain them, given its reliance on potentially volatile deposits.

“The auditors didn’t mention the fire in the basement or the box of dynamite on the second floor, but they did mention the peeling paint on the planter,” says Erik Gordon, a business professor at the University of Michigan.”How could they have overlooked interest rate risk?” The current banking crisis is the first litmus test of the system of critical audit issues, a measure designed to help investors decipher hidden risks and uncertainties in financial statements.

Auditors are required to record any critical audit issues when approving a public company’s books. Regulators define them as matters that have a significant impact on financial statements and involve “especially difficult, subjective or complex” judgments by auditors.

One of the most closely watched US defamation cases in decades is set to begin this week as a Delaware court picks a jury to decide whether Fox News should pay Dominion Voting Systems $1.6bn (£1.3bn) for spreading falsehoods on election rigging.

A critical task for jurors over the five-week trial will be to decide who was responsible for the cable network’s decision to broadcast the claims, despite internal doubts about their veracity. Dominion asserts that Fox’s top brass approved of the coverage, but the network disputes this.

Last week, Delaware Superior Court Judge Eric Davis said he would not block Dominion from calling Rupert Murdoch, chairman of Fox News parent company Fox Corp, to testify in person about his involvement in the coverage, which Judge Davis has ruled was false and defamatory.

“The more complicit the whole organisation is in perpetuating these known falsehoods, the more likely a jury would be to return a big dollar figure,” said Mary-Rose Papandrea, a constitutional law professor.

A U.S. judge rejected requests to sever JPMorgan Chase & Co’s lawsuit accusing former executive Jes Staley of concealing what he knew about Jeffrey Epstein from two related lawsuits over its work for the late sex offender.

Monday’s decision by U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff in Manhattan is a defeat for Staley, who said the scheduled Oct. 23 trial for all three cases left him too little time to defend against JPMorgan’s “slanderous” accusations.

It is also a defeat for women who claim that Epstein sexually abused them and are suing the largest U.S. bank.

They claimed that JPMorgan sued Staley as a means to “harass and intimidate” them into revealing private medical records and communications in their case.

Epstein was a JPMorgan client from 2000 to 2013. The U.S. Virgin Islands, where the financier had a home, is also suing JPMorgan.

+ Walmart is suing Capital One in an attempt to end its credit-card contract with the bank.
+ The retailer said the McLean, Virginia-based bank has repeatedly failed to meet a number of contractual obligations in its card partnership deal, according to a lawsuit filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
+ Capital One “was consistently unable to meet the customer-service standards” outlined in its contract, such as issuing replacement cards and promptly processing payments and posting transactions, Walmart alleged in the suit.

Most Wall Street banks are likely to report lower quarterly earnings and face a dour outlook for the rest of the year, with last month’s regional banking crisis and a slowing economy expected to hurt profitability.

Earnings per share for the six biggest U.S. banks are expected to be down about 10% from a year earlier, analyst estimates from Refinitiv I/B/E/S show. Banks start reporting results on April 14.

Access to cheap deposits, which swelled for bigger banks as savers fled smaller lenders in the wake of Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse last month, likely boosted net interest income for the largest banks, analysts said.