Category: corporate corruption

In September, a class action lawsuit (Mannacio v. Discover Financial Services, et al., No. 23-cv-06788 (N.D. Ill.)) was filed against Discover Financial Services (“Discover”) alleging Discover and certain current and/or former executives violated the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Specifically, the class action complaint alleged that the defendants made false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose that: (i) Discover maintained deficient risk management and compliance procedures; (ii) as a result, Discover, among other things, failed to comply with applicable…

Thomas Flohr, owner of luxury airline VistaJet, must fight a claim that he defrauded a Guernsey investment partnership two decades ago after London’s High Court refused to dismiss the case.  Flohr, who denies the allegations, had tried to have the case thrown out on technical grounds related to the circumstances of the case, in which a previously dissolved partnership was resurrected in 2021 in order to file the suit.  Frontiers Capital initially sued for breach of contract in 2021 but…

Airbnb is facing the prospect of a tax bill worth hundreds of millions of euros following an Italian court ruling in an evasion case. Prosecutors in Milan say a judge authorised the seizure of €779.5m (£677m) from the short-term property rental platform. They said it related to an alleged failure by the company to comply with laws that require Airbnb to pay Italian tax authorities 21% of landlords’ rental income in the country. The requirement dates back to an EU…

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 a vote by shareholders, the people said, asking not to be identified as the decision isn’t yet public. The approval…

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was convicted of fraud and money laundering by a New York jury in a landmark criminal verdict that is likely to condemn the former crypto tycoon to decades in prison […] The decision […] was delivered just after 7.40pm on Thursday, following less than five hours of deliberation by the jury’s nine women and three men over seven charges including wire fraud on FTX customers and conspiracy to commit securities fraud and money laundering. Bankman-Fried was…

The Trump era was very, very good to the country’s giant telecom monopolies. Trump officials doled out billions in tax breaks (AT&T nabbed $42 billion alone) and billions more in poorly tracked subsidies. It also approved anticompetitive mergers without even reading the details, and handed out all manner of regulator favors like the dismantling of net neutrality or the elimination of media consolidation rules. In absolutely every instance telecoms like AT&T and Comcast claimed these efforts would boost broadband deployment…

Hackers have accessed approximately 632,000 emails from the Department of Defense and other federal agencies this year, the US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) confirmed. The report detailed a large-scale cyberattack in May 2023 in which emails from US government offices, private sectors, airlines, and academic entities were accessed by a suspected Russian group called “CL0P.” Alongside electronic personal data, the actors breached internal tracking codes and government employee survey links issued by agencies. Through File Transfer Software The cybercriminals…

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried plans to testify at his fraud trial, his lawyer told a federal judge Wednesday, ending speculation over whether a man who embraced the spotlight during his years atop the cryptocurrency world could remain silent after prosecutors portrayed him as a greedy entrepreneur who stole billions of dollars from customers. Attorney Mark Cohen told Judge Lewis A. Kaplan that he planned to call three witnesses “and then our client is also going to be testifying” after prosecutors…

The Intercept has an interesting article that reveals another reason why some newspaper publishers are not great fans of the site: The New York Times tried to block a web crawler that was affiliated with the famous Internet Archive, a project whose easy-to-use comparisons of article versions has sometimes led to embarrassment for the newspaper. As the article explains, one of the important uses of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is to compare Web pages as they are updated over time. It allows the…

At least 24 journalists are among the more than 6,000 people who have been killed in the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas, according to the latest tally released Wednesday by the Committee to Protect Journalists. In addition to the steep toll the fighting has meant for civilians in the region, the conflict in Gaza has resulted in the deadliest stretch for journalists in Israel and the occupied territories since the committee began tracking journalist deaths in 1992, the organization’s…

SEOUL – South Korean authorities arrested Kakao’s chief investment officer (CIO) for alleged stock price manipulation in a high-profile takeover battle over K-pop agency SM Entertainment. Bae Jae-hyun was arrested early on Thursday, according to the Seoul Southern District Court which issued the warrant. Internet giant Kakao won a controlling stake in SM after an intense bidding war with Hybe, the label behind hit boy group BTS. Financial regulators accused the executive, along with two others working at Kakao and…

U.S. Attorney’s Office Eastern District of Florida FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Thursday, October 12, 2023  BEAUMONT, Texas – A Houston man who served as a production manager in a counterfeit drug trafficking scheme has been sentenced to federal prison for drug trafficking and money laundering violations in the Eastern District of Texas, announced U.S. Attorney Damien M. Diggs today. Willis Reed, 61, pleaded guilty to conspiracy and was sentenced to 60 months in federal prison today by U.S. District Judge Marcia…

Suavecito was the first product that Douglas Mrdeza listed to sell on Amazon back in 2014. He had ordered a bit too much of the specialty hair pomade for his barbershop in East Lansing, Michigan. He wanted to see whether he could offload some online. It sold out. So, he ordered more. This time he paid Amazon some extra money to use its warehouse storage and shipping service. “I did the calculation, bought what would have sold in a month…

Facing a likely roadblock from House Republicans on aid for Ukraine, President Joe Biden said Wednesday he’s planning to give a major speech on the issue and suggested there may be “another means” to provide support for Kyiv if Congress continues to balk. “I’m going to be announcing very shortly a major speech I’m going to make on this issue and why it’s critically important for the United States and our allies that we keep our commitment” to Ukraine, Biden…

I know many of you have heard this before, but Cory Doctorow’s “enshittification” concept is such a useful framework to think about things: first, companies are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. As I’ve highlighted, much of this is driven by the ridiculous demands of Wall St. and the belief that companies have a fiduciary…

Sept 28 (Reuters) – Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives hold their first hearing on Thursday in an impeachment inquiry into Democratic President Joe Biden after months of investigations of his son Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings. They have not found any evidence of misconduct by Biden himself. The White House says Biden has done nothing wrong and Republicans have no basis for an impeachment inquiry. Following is some of the evidence that has come to light: HUNTER’S BUSINESSES Republicans have…