Banking, Finance & Services

This profile of French banking is from CorpWatch's EuroZone Profiteers report which investigates the role of six major banks in Greece, Ireland and Spain during the EuroZone crisis. Loans from these banks helped fuel the credit boom that left the countries deep in debt. Read More

The EuroZone Profiteers: A CorpWatch Report. Profile of Eurohypo/Commerzbank which was given a €18 billion bailout in March 2012. Three months later it began winding down Eurohypo by selling off assets. Read More

JP Morgan, the Wall Street bank, is negotiating to escape criminal prosecution for its role in the sub-prime mortgage crisis in return for paying the U.S. government roughly $3 billion, plus $6 billion to investors, and another $4 billion to compensate home owners. Read More

JP Morgan, the Wall Street investment bank, has been fined $920 million for violating trading laws that were discovered after trader Bruno Iksil (nicknamed the "London Whale") lost billions in bets last May. It was also fined over $80 million for credit card scams in an unrelated incident. Read More

Julio Ponce, the billionaire owner of Sociedad Quimica & Minera de Chile (SQM), faces ten years in prison for insider trading. A beneficiary of former dictator General Augusto Pinochet, Ponce is charged with buying company shares at below market prices and selling them at a profit. Read More

JP Morgan Chase is expected to announce over $600 million in penalties and repayments for allegedly cheating customers in energy markets in California and Michigan. This just after Barclays bank paid out $470 million for manipulating electricity rates. Now Goldman Sachs is under scrutiny for possibly manipulating aluminum prices. Read More

U.S. corporate CEO salaries rose 16 percent in 2012, according to research firm Equilar. Average daily CEO pay is now greater than that of the average annual worker salary. Top salary: Larry Ellison of Oracle - over $96 million. Top exit bonus: James Mulva of ConocoPhillips - $156 million. Read More

Executives at one of Ireland's biggest banks laughed and joked about how they were going to fool the Central Bank into bailing them out, according to a tape recording obtained by the Irish Independent. The failure of Anglo Irish Bank is eventually expected to cost the taxpayer €30 billion. Read More

Steve Cohen, the billionaire founder of the most profitable hedge fund in history with $15 billion in assets averaging 30 percent in annual profits for two decades, has become the most watched man on Wall Street. Will he lose all his outside investors and will he go to jail? Read More

Farmers in North Carolina are regretting the day that they put their trust in the Egg King - Oleg Bakhmatyuk - a billionaire agricultural investor from the Ukraine. Over 100 farmers are suing a subsidiary of his global empire for almost $10 million for reneging on chicken sales contracts. Read More