Law & Regulation

Bank of America leads the list of companies that have paid over $1 billion in penalties and fines to the U.S. government in the last six years. Violation Tracker, a new corporate misconduct database maintained by Good Jobs First, estimates that the North Carolina bank has paid $56 billion. Read More

The U.S. government is investigating Citadel, a Chicago-based hedge firm and market maker that manages some $25 billion in client money, for allegedly giving smaller investors a bad deal. The Department of Justice wants to know if the firm is taking advantage of the complexity of high-speed trading. Read More

The South African government has intervened to support the Indian-born Gupta brothers, owners of a sprawling conglomerate with interests from mining to media, following a scandal that suggested that the brothers had accumulated so much power that they could dictate cabinet-level decisions in the country. Read More

IOI, the second largest producer of palm oil in Malaysia, has been kicked out of an industry group that certifies sustainability practices, for environmental and labor violations. As a result, dozens of companies, including the makers of Dove soap, M&M's and Kellogg's Corn Flakes, have stopped buying from IOI. Read More

Did a few individual traders in London conspire to rig global interest rates in order to enrich themselves or were they just pawns in an ongoing conspiracy by major banks designed to routinely skim billions from the international financial system? Read More

The World Bank's International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) has ordered the government of Venezuela to pay US$1.386 billion to Crystallex, a bankrupt Canadian gold mining company, for canceling a 2002 permit to mine for gold in the Imataca Forest Reserve Read More

Johnson & Johnson has been sued by over 1,200 women who blame the company's talcum powder products for their ovarian cancer. Not only are U.S. courts beginning to agree with them, juries have started to award victims millions of dollars in compensation. Read More

Netherlands-based telecommunications giant VimpelCom announced today that it would pay U.S. and Dutch authorities $795 million to end an investigation into bribery in Uzbekistan. While the settlement does not reveal the recipient of the bribes, most sources point to Gulnara Karimova, daughter of the Uzbek president. Read More

Investment Technology Group (ITG), a U.S. stock broker, paid a $20.3 million fine for running a secret operation named Project Omega to take advantage of "dark pools" trading orders made by its clients. Experts say that Barclays and Credit Suisse may also soon pay fines for dark pools trading scams. Read More

Hundreds of drugs tested in India have been banned from sale in the European Union after French inspectors found flaws in clinical trials conducted by GVK Biosciences, a company based in Hyderabad. The Indian government has threatened to take legal action against the ban under international trade rules. Read More