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The UK's Lord Ashcroft, the Conservative party deputy chairman and major donor, has agreed to sell his loss-making US janitorial business in a deal that will bring him a £132m windfall.
Some 15,000 lobbyists work in Brussels where they meet secretly with European Union officials to try and influence the rules that govern the 27 countries that together form the world's most powerful economic bloc. New guidelines will attempt to make this lobbying more public and reveal conflicts of interest.
A company controlled by Democratic Party donor Norman Hsu recently received $40 million from a Madison Avenue investment fund run by Joel Rosenman, who was one of the creators of the Woodstock rock festival in 1969. That money, Mr. Rosenman told investors this week, is missing.
Political fortunes and high costs have forced some presidential candidates to switch from using chartered private jets to those of corporations, including John McCain, who had previously sponsored a bill limiting use of corporate jets by candidates.
European commissioners, the continent's regulators, have been criticised by their own watchdog for refusing to divulge details of meetings they and their staff have held with lobbyists.
An Alaskan Inupiat Eskimo firm has been awarded a multi-million dollar no-bid contract to feed Bolivian soldiers and police in that country's continuing drug war, raising questions concerning the firms on-going relationship with former Halliburton subsidiary KBR and the US Senate's Alaskan Native Corporation privilege.
Two investors in Reed Elsevier have sold their shares as a protest that the publishing giant runs arms fairs which have included the sale of torture equipment.
A so-called "vulture" fund has been given permission by a British court to enforce a claim for tens of millions of dollars theoretically owed by Zambia.
As institutional investors learned that Chinese oil companies are helping to finance genocide in Sudan, many took action.
If the European Union's eight-year effort to tighten laws governing chemicals testing has spawned one of the biggest and most costly industry lobbying campaigns that Brussels has ever seen, it has also given new impetus to efforts to regulate how lobbying is done at the European Commission.
In order to influence the new laws that encompass the 25 countries of the European Union, now the world's largest single economy, some 15,000 lobbyists have flocked to Brussels, its political heart. The public relations firm Burson-Mastellar is one of the most active among them.
Tony Blair admitted yesterday that there was a direct link between donating large sums of money to the Labour Party and being nominated for a seat in the House of Lords.