Corruption Ledger

Pennsylvania-based medical device distributor Jet Medical Inc. (Jet) agreed to pay $200,000 to resolve criminal allegations relating to a migraine headache treatment, and Jet and two related companies agreed to pay another $545,000 in a civil settlement involving the same device. In a criminal information filed today in the Southern District of Illinois, the government alleged that between April 2014 and April 2019, Jet introduced into interstate commerce devices that were misbranded under the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act…

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried pleaded not guilty in Manhattan federal court Tuesday to charges that he cheated investors and looted customer deposits on his cryptocurrency trading platform as a judge set a tentative trial date for October. Bankman-Fried, 30, denied charges accusing him of illegally diverting massive sums of customer money from FTX to make lavish real estate purchases, donate money to politicians and make risky trades at Alameda Research, his cryptocurrency hedge fund trading firm. Bankman-Fried’s attorney, Mark Cohen,…

The House Jan 6 committee is shutting down, having completed a whirlwind 18-month investigation of the 2021 Capitol insurrection and sent its work to the Justice Department along with a recommendation for prosecuting former President Donald Trump. The committee’s time officially ends Tuesday when the new Republican-led House is sworn in. With many of the committee’s staff already departed, remaining aides have spent the last two weeks releasing many of the panel’s materials, including its 814-page final report, about 200…

  U.S. Department of Justice FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Tuesday, December 20, 2022 A federal grand jury in the District of Maryland returned an indictment that was unsealed today charging two men for their roles in schemes to defraud investors in CytoDyn Inc., a publicly traded biotechnology company (OTCQB: CYDY) based in Vancouver, Washington. According to court documents, Nader Pourhassan, 59, of Lake Oswego, Oregon, and Kazem Kazempour, 69, of Potomac, Maryland, allegedly engaged in a conspiracy to defraud investors through…

Bladimir Moreno, 55, was sentenced for leading a federal racketeering and forced labor conspiracy that victimized Mexican H-2A agricultural workers in the United States between 2015 and 2017. U.S. District Court Judge Charlene Edward Honeywell of the Middle District of Florida sentenced Moreno to 118 months in prison with three years of supervised release and ordered him to pay over $175,000 in restitution to the victims. Moreno, the owner of Los Villatoros Harvesting LLC (LVH), the labor contracting company that…

Ukrainian oligarch Konstantin Zhevago, accused of embezzlement and money laundering, was arrested at an elite French ski resort. Zhevago was arrested by French law enforcement at the request of the Ukrainian State Bureau of Investigation, the agency said Wednesday in a statement. French and Ukrainian law enforcement had been cooperating on the case for months before the oligarch’s arrest. The former head of Ukraine’s “Finances and Credit” group, Zhevago is accused of “organizing a mechanism for the embezzlement” of $113…

A Manhattan federal judge known for swift decisions and a no-nonsense demeanor during three decades of overseeing numerous high-profile cases was assigned Tuesday to Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency case. The case was relegated to Judge Lewis A. Kaplan after the judge originally assigned recused herself because her husband worked for a law firm that had done work related to Bankman-Fried’s collapsed crypto exchange FTX. Bankman-Fried, arrested in the Bahamas two weeks ago, was brought to the United States last week to…

The anti-corruption unit of Peru’s attorney general’s office on Monday detained six generals amid an investigation into allegations the government of ousted former President Pedro Castillo illegally promoted police and military officers. Police also seized “documents and devices” during a raid of the home of Castillo’s former Defense Minister Walter Ayala, the anti-corruption unit said. Castillo, who was arrested earlier this month after lawmakers voted him out of office for attempting to illegally dissolve Congress, is being investigated for influence…

South Korea’s military fired warning shots, scrambled fighter jets and flew surveillance assets across the heavily fortified border with North Korea on Monday, after North Korean drones violated its airspace for the first time in five years in a fresh escalation of tensions. South Korea’s military detected five drones from North Korea crossing the border, and one traveled as far as the northern part of the South Korean capital region, which is about an hour’s drive away, South Korea’s Joint Chiefs…

A former Tokyo Olympics official arrested on bribery charges was granted bail on Monday. The Tokyo District court set bail for Haruyuki Takahashi at 80 million yen, NHK reported. Prosecutors have raided multiple companies in recent months in a widening corruption scandal related to the Tokyo Games. Takahashi, a former member of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics board and before that an executive at advertising giant Dentsu Inc, was arrested in August on suspicion of receiving bribes from Olympic sponsors. Reuters…

KPMG India settled a proceeding before the US Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB) on 6 December 2022; but there is barely any coverage by the Indian media. PCAOB, which audits public companies, censured KPMG Assurance and Consulting Services LLP (KPMG India) and the engagement partner (EP) Sagar P Lakhani for quality control failures, supervisory failures and documentation failures while working with a public company in 2017. It led to a monetary penalty of US$1mn (million) on KPMG India and…

An internal investigation by parent company ByteDance confirms that employees obtained personal data from reporters who were probing Beijing’s influence on the app’s activities ByteDance, the Chinese technology giant that owns TikTok, admitted Thursday that several employees of the social network spied on journalists from Forbes magazine who were investigating the link between the company’s US branch and China. The information first came to light in October but was confirmed on December 23 by Forbes, which had access to an…

As the U.S. deals with its deadliest overdose crisis to date, a national crime-prevention group is calling on the Justice Department to clamp down on social media’s role in the spread of fentanyl, the drug largely driving a troubling spike in overdose deaths among teenagers. The National Crime Prevention Council sent a letter Wednesday to Attorney General Merrick Garland, calling for an investigation. The group known for ads featuring McGruff the Crime Dog is especially concerned about the sale of…

Zyno Medical LLC (Zyno), a medical device manufacturer headquartered in Massachusetts, has agreed to pay $493,140 to resolve allegations that it violated the False Claims Act by causing the submission of claims to Medicare in connection with the intravenous (IV) administration of medication using devices Zyno knew were materially defective. The settlement announced today resolves allegations that Zyno knowingly distributed defective IV administration sets that were used to deliver controlled dosages of chemotherapy and other medications to Medicare beneficiaries. As…

German authorities said on Thursday they had arrested an employee of its foreign intelligence service (BND) on suspicion of sharing state secrets with Russia this year and thereby committing treason. Police arrested the suspect, a German citizen identified as Carsten L, on Wednesday in Berlin, the federal prosecutors office said. It said police also raided his flat and workplace as well as those of another person. “The accused is suspected of state treason,” federal prosecutors said in a statement. “In…