Category: Crime

Twitter chief Elon Musk fired three top executives when he took over the social media platform. The then company CEO Parag Agrawal, policy chief Vijaya Gadde along with CFO Nel Segal were removed from their positions a day after Musk took over. Turns out they have all filed lawsuits against Musk demanding reimbursement for litigation costs, investigations and inquiries related to their former jobs. Agrawal, along with the company’s former chief legal and financial officers, claim in the lawsuit that they are owed over $1 million, which Twitter is legally obligated to pay.

As per AFP report, The court filing listed various expenses associated with inquiries by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Department of Justice (DOJ), but did not disclose the nature of the investigations or if they are still ongoing. Agrawal and former chief financial officer Ned Segal testified to the SEC last year and continued to engage with federal authorities. The SEC is examining whether Musk complied with securities rules when he purchased Twitter shares.

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.

SEOUL (Reuters) – South Korea’s antitrust regulator has fined Alphabet Inc’s Google 42.1 billion won ($31.88 million) for blocking the release of mobile video games on a competitor’s platform.

The Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) said on Tuesday that Google bolstered its market dominance, and hurt local app market One Store’s revenue and value as a platform, by requiring video game makers to exclusively release their titles on Google Play in exchange for providing in-app exposure between June 2016 and April 2018.

The KFTC said the move against the U.S. technology giant is part of efforts by the government to ensure fair markets.

Game makers affected by Google’s action include Netmarble, Nexon and NCSOFT, as well as other smaller companies, the antitrust regulator added.

In 2021, Google was fined more than 200 billion won by the KFTC for blocking customised versions of its Android operating system.

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.

Thousands of Israelis, including ministers in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government, marched to an evacuated Jewish outpost in the West Bank on Monday in support of settlements viewed as illegal under international law. As tensions mounted between Israelis and Palestinians, Israelis from across the country travelled to the outpost of Evyatar while waving Israeli flags and chanting religious songs…

The mayor of Baltimore called for a summer curfew after two teenagers were shot while police were attempting to break up a large crowd of minors.

A California-based owner of a Tesla vehicle has sued the electric carmaker in a prospective class action lawsuit accusing it of violating the privacy of customers. The lawsuit was filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California on Friday. It came after reports on Thursday that groups of Tesla employees privately shared via an internal…

According to nine former workers who talked to the agency, groups of employees shared private footage of customers in Tesla’s internal one-on-one chats between 2019 and 2022. One of the clips in question captured a man approaching his electric car while he was completely naked, one of the sources said.

Binance, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, is facing a lawsuit filed by the United States Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) for allegedly violating US law by allowing US clients to trade on its platform without complying with Know Your Customer (KYC) standards. In the lawsuit, the CFTC identified three trading firms – Jane Street Group, Tower Research Capital, and Radix Trading – as Binance’s VIP clients, who allegedly received preferential treatment from the exchange.

According to Bloomberg, which cited “people familiar with the matter,” Radix Trading was identified as “Trading Firm A” in the CFTC’s suit, while Jane Street was “Trading Firm B” and Tower Research was “Trading Firm C.” The firms on the CFTC’s list were examples of US clients allegedly able to access Binance, despite not complying with KYC standards.

The American bank Wells Fargo has been fined $97.8m (£79m) by the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department for breaching US sanctions laws. Inadequate oversight meant that it allowed a foreign institution to process $532m in illegal transactions involving Iran, Syria and Sudan. Wells Fargo said it stopped dealing with the client in 2015.

The U.S. Virgin Islands issued subpoenas this week to Sergey Brin, Thomas Pritzker, Mortimer Zuckerman and Michael Ovitz to gather information for its civil lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase & Co. over the bank’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, according to people familiar with the matter.

The subpoenas from the U.S. territory’s attorney general seek any communications and documents related to the bank and Epstein, the people said.

The four men are some of the wealthiest people in the U.S., and it couldn’t be determined why they were being asked for the communications and documents. In civil cases, lawyers can use subpoenas during the discovery process to get information from people who aren’t a party to a lawsuit but could provide evidence related to the case.

The U.S. Virgin Islands sued JPMorgan late last year in a Manhattan federal court, saying the bank facilitated Epstein’s alleged sex trafficking and abuse by allowing the late financier to remain a client and helping him send money to his victims. The civil lawsuit alleges that JPMorgan received referrals of high-value business opportunities from Epstein and turned a blind eye to his activities. The bank has said it didn’t know about Epstein’s alleged crimes and can’t be held liable.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said the verdict could not stand after the U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board canceled the virtual private network (VPN) patents VirnetX accused Apple of infringing.

The ruling follows the Federal Circuit’s Thursday decision to affirm a U.S. Patent and Trademark Office tribunal’s finding that the patents were invalid.

U.S. corporate due diligence firm Mintz Group said on Thursday its Beijing office was raided by authorities and five Chinese staff were detained, stoking worry among foreign companies in China just as its capital hosts an international economic forum.

News of the raid and detentions comes as Sino-U.S. relations have spiraled downwards following months of diplomatic tensions, including over the U.S. military downing in February of a suspected Chinese spy balloon and a planned U.S. transit next week by the president of Taiwan, the self-governed island China claims as its territory.

“We can confirm that Chinese authorities have detained the five staff in Mintz Group’s Beijing office, all of them Chinese nationals, and have closed our operations there,” the company said in an emailed statement to Reuters.

The company said it was ready to work with Chinese authorities to “resolve any misunderstanding that may have led to these events”, and that its top concern was the safety and wellbeing of colleagues in China.

Last week, Denmark’s Foreign Minister Lars Rasmussen announced that his government could corroborate a report by the Russian gas giant Gazprom, the operator of the undersea pipeline, about a strange object found near Nord Stream 2. The company sent pictures of the item to Danish authorities, while the Russian government made a formal inquiry through its embassy, the minister said. Copenhagen treats the discovery seriously and will investigate further, Rasmussen pledged at the time.

The object was mentioned last week by Russian President Vladimir Putin in a TV interview. He said it was found during a Gazprom survey about 30 kilometers away from where the pipeline was breached. The device may be an antenna used in remotely detonating a charge, the president suggested, citing experts.

Moscow asked for permission to explore further, Putin added, necessary because the object is located in Denmark’s exclusive zone. Russia could organize a mission “on its own, jointly with [the Danes], or, better yet, with an international group of experts in explosives who are trained to work at such depth.” Rasmussen said such permission would not be granted, triggering a rebuke from the Russian Foreign Ministry.

The railroad at the heart of the hazardous train crash near the Ohio-Pennsylvania border offered vague answers Monday about who agreed to burn the derailed cars carrying vinyl chloride.

Norfolk Southern CEO Alan Shaw told the Senate Veterans Affairs and Emergency Preparedness Committee that a unified command team – led by a local fire chief in East Palestine, Ohio and Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine – OK’d the “controlled release” plan on Feb. 6 to prevent a dangerous explosion that would have spread contaminants and deadly shrapnel across the region.

Majority Chairman Doug Mastriano, R-Chambersburg, questioned the use of “controlled” to describe the railroad’s decision to set the train cars on fire and watch plumes of smoke drift for miles over homes and farmland.

“You’re blaming it on a chief in East Palestine, correct?” he said. “So your cars are on fire, it’s your rail, it’s your incident and you’re going to leave it to a local fire chief who’s likley never had to deal with this before?”