Bribery, Fraud & Tax Evasion

Alstom, a French engineering company, has been accused of bribing Indonesian officials to win a lucrative contract to build coal power plans in Sumatra. Frederic Pierucci, a French employee of the company, was arrested and David Rothschild, a U.S. employee, has pled guilty. Read More

KPMG, the fourth biggest accounting firm in the world, has announced that it has fired Scott London, one of its top partners. New reports indicate that London was let go for providing insider information on two companies - Herbalife and Skechers. Read More

JP Morgan - the Wall Street investment bank - and SAC - a major hedge fund - were hauled up Friday for alleged fraud. JP Morgan was questioned at a U.S. Senate hearing about hiding trading losses while SAC agreed to pay $614 million to settle insider trading charges. Read More

SAC Capital is one of the most profitable hedge funds in history with $15 billion in assets averaging 30 percent in annual profits for 20 years running. Today Wall Street is watching nervously as U.S. government lawyers work on a case against billionaire founder Steven Cohen for insider trading. Read More

Associated British Foods (ABF), a UK company that makes Silver Spoon sugar, pays almost no taxes on its profitable Zambian sugar subsidiary, according to a new ActionAid report. The authors allege ABF has avoided estimated taxes of $27 million since 2007, enough to put 48,000 Zambian children in school. Read More

The medieval alchemists claimed they could turn ordinary metals into gold. Analysts at Standard & Poors (S&P), Wall Street's top ratings agency, claimed that bad loans to poor people were wildly profitably. A U.S. government investigation alleges that S&P financial analysts are no different from the hucksters of yore. Read More

Executives from three major Spanish construction companies are in the limelight for allegedly contributing to a slush fund for the Partido Popular, the Spanish ruling party: Fomento de Construcciones y Contratas from Barcelona, Obrascón Huarte Lain and Sacyr Vallehermoso from Madrid. The scandal has rocked the conservative government of Mariano Rajoy. Read More

Morgan Stanley, a major U.S. investment bank, was well aware of the problems in the sub-prime mortgage market as far back as 2005, according to documents just released in a New York court under a lawsuit brought by the China Development Industrial Bank from Taiwan. Read More

Range Resources, a Texas company, bullied the federal government into dropping a scientific report on environmental contamination caused by fracking, a new investigation has just revealed. This comes on the heels of two major pro-fracking academic reports that had to be withdrawn in 2012. Read More

Ten major U.S. banks settled charges of illegally kicking people out of their homes for pennies on the dollar, under two agreements with the government. The biggest beneficiary is Bank of America which will win a get-out-of-jail free card for selling fraudulent loans to the government. Read More