Law & Regulation

UBS, the Swiss bank, is being investigated by the Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission for failing to carry out adequate due diligence before working on share offerings for several Chinese companies. The bank says that it is at risk of being suspended from doing business in the city. Read More

Police departments across the U.S. pay AT&T, the telecommunications giant, over one hundred thousand dollars a year for special access to telephone records of clients without first obtaining a warrant. The program is called 'Hemisphere' and the company required buyers to keep its existence secret. Read More

Representatives of some 280 indigenous nations have joined a protest on the Standing Rock Sioux reservation in North Dakota to oppose the construction of an oil pipeline by Energy Transfer Partners. If completed, the Dakota Access Pipeline is expected to help move 570,000 barrels of crude daily to Illinois. Read More

Six executives of Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis have been indicted in a South Korean bribery scandal. The indictments follow similar charges in China, Turkey and the U.S. and allegations of falsifying drug trial data in Japan. Korean prosecutors have recommended that Novartis sales be suspended for six months. Read More

Cairn Energy, a Scottish oil exploration company, has demanded that India pay $5.6 billion in compensation for losses that the company claims it has sustained as a result of a tax bill. The company has taken its claim to an arbitration panel under the United Kingdom-India Investment Treaty. Read More

Gilead Sciences Inc., a California based pharmaceutical company, has avoided paying $10 billion in taxes by moving its patents to Ireland. This is despite the fact that one of its most profitable drugs was developed with U.S. taxpayer money, according to a new report from Americans for Tax Fairness. Read More

Uruguay has defeated Philip Morris, the global tobacco giant, in a major international lawsuit over the country's tough anti-smoking regulations. The Swiss-based company sued Uruguay at the World Bank's International Center for Settlement of Investment Dispute under the terms of a 1991 bilateral investment treaty between Uruguay and Switzerland. Read More

Villagers in Tororo district, Uganda, not far from the Kenyan border, say that Guangzhou Dongsong Energy, a company from China, has conspired with the government to cheat them out of their land titles in order to build a $600 million phosphate mine and industrial complex. Read More

The UK Serious Fraud Office has notched up another win in the global interest rate setting scandal by sending three Barclays traders to jail. Of the 20 bankers that have been charged to date, five have been found guilty, six have been let go while nine are to face trial. Read More

Vietnam has asked Formosa Ha Tinh Steel Corporation to pay $500 million in compensation for dumping toxic waste in Ky Anh that resulted in a massive fish kill on a 120 mile stretch of Vietnam's central coast in the provinces of Ha Tinh, Hue, Quang Binh and Quang Tri. Read More