Corruption Ledger

A court in Romania’s capital Bucharest has upheld the 30-day arrest of divisive social media personality and self-described misogynist Andrew Tate on charges of organized crime, human trafficking and rape, an official said late Tuesday. Ramona Bolla, a spokesperson for Romanian anti-organized crime agency DIICOT, said the court rejected an appeal by Tate against a judge’s earlier decision to extend his arrest from 24 hours to 30 days. Tate, 36, a British-U.S. citizen who has 4.5 million followers on Twitter,…

Allen Weisselberg, a longtime executive for Donald Trump and the star prosecution witness in the criminal trial of the former president’s real estate company, was sentenced on Tuesday to five months behind bars for helping engineer a wide-ranging tax fraud at the Trump Organization. Weisselberg, 75, was expected to be sent to New York’s notorious Rikers Island jail after pleading guilty last August to all 15 counts he faced in an agreement with prosecutors. The Trump Organization’s former chief financial…

U.S. Supreme Court justices on Tuesday wrestled with a labor dispute that could narrow federal protections for unions by making it easier for employers to sue over strikes that result in damage to company property. The justices heard oral arguments in an appeal by a concrete business in Washington state called Glacier Northwest Inc of a lower court’s ruling in favor of a local affiliate of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in the company’s lawsuit against the union arising from…

Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) announced on January 4, 2023, that it has fined Meta a total of €390 million after finding that the company’s Facebook and Instagram platforms lacked proper legal grounds for processing millions of Europeans’ personal data for targeted advertising. In addition to posing challenges for Meta’s business model, the DPC’s two decisions reflect growing disagreement among European data protection authorities (DPAs) on two fronts.  The first relates to the use of ‘contractual necessity’ as an appropriate…

The Chinese embassy in South Korea has suspended issuing short-term visas for South Korean visitors, it said on Tuesday, the first retaliatory move against nations imposing COVID-19 curbs on travellers from China. The embassy will adjust the policy subject to the lifting of South Korea’s “discriminatory entry restrictions” against China, it said on its official WeChat account. A Chinese embassy official confirmed the new measures. The announcement comes a day after Foreign Minister Qin Gang expressed concern about the restrictions…

  U.S. Department of Justice FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Wednesday, January 4, 2022 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…

A US jury has ordered Bayer subsidiary Monsanto to pay $857 million (£676 million) to seven people – including former students and parent volunteers at a school in Washington state – who said they were sickened by exposure to polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) that the company sold. The PBCs were apparently used in fire safety fluid in the school that leaked from its light fixtures, and the plaintiffs reported neurological, endocrine and other health problems. Monsanto explains that the claims in…

The Department of Justice and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced today that they filed a Statement of Interest to explain the Fair Housing Act’s (FHA) application to algorithm-based tenant screening systems. The Statement of Interest was filed in Louis et al. v. SafeRent et al., a lawsuit currently pending in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts alleging that defendants’ use of an algorithm-based scoring system to screen tenants discriminates against Black and Hispanic…

A Romanian national was sentenced today to 89 months in prison for his role in a transnational, multimillion-dollar scheme to defraud American victims. He is the 24th member of the organized criminal group to be sentenced, of the 28 who were charged. Ionut-Razvan Sandu, 35, of Romania, pleaded guilty in April 2022 to conspiracy to commit a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) offense. Four other defendants pleaded guilty to this offense and were sentenced for their roles in…

Four California agricultural companies and their owner have agreed to settle allegations that they violated the False Claims Act (FCA) and the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery and Enforcement Act (FIRREA) by knowingly submitting false information in support of Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan applications. Mendota Land Co., Sweetwood Farm Co. LLC, Sweetwood Farm Inc., Seasholtz Co. LLC, and their owner John Seasholtz (collectively, “Seasholtz”) are alleged to have improperly inflated the employee headcount on the companies’ PPP loan applications by…

On December 29, 2022, the French Data Protection Authority (the “CNIL”) announced that it imposed an €8,000,000 fine on Apple for violations of the French rules on targeted advertising and the use of cookies and similar tracking technologies. Background The CNIL received a complaint concerning Apple’s ad personalization practices on the App Store and carried out several investigations between 2021 and 2022. The CNIL’s investigations concluded that Apple was collecting the identifiers of users that visited the App Store using…

Two Dubai entities and several individuals were charged in an indictment unsealed in the District of Maryland recently for their roles in a multimillion-dollar scheme to export non-organic grain into the United States to be sold as certified organic. Hakan Agro DMCC and Hakan Organics DMCC, both based in Dubai, and Goksal Beyaz, Nuray Beyaz and Mustafa Cakiroglu, all of Turkey, were each charged with conspiracy, smuggling, and wire fraud. An initial appearance for Hakan Agro and Hakan Organics was…

The former Bolivian Minister of Government was sentenced today to 70 months in prison for conspiracy to launder bribes he received in exchange for corruptly helping a U.S. company win a lucrative contract from the Bolivian government. Arturo Carlos Murillo Prijic, 58, of Bolivia, pleaded guilty on Oct. 20, 2022, to one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering. According to court documents, Murillo received at least $532,000 in bribe payments from a Florida-based company in exchange for helping that company secure…

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,…