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A corporate espionage case unfolding in France involves some of the biggest French companies, including Électricité de France, the world's largest operator of nuclear power plants, and Vivendi, the media and telecommunications conglomerate. The story has the elements of a corporate thriller: a cast of characters that includes former French spies and military men, an American cycling champion, Greenpeace activists and a dogged judge.

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has warned Charles Schwab & Co. that his office plans to sue the firm for civil fraud over its marketing and sales of auction-rate securities to clients. Emails and testimony cited in the letter show Schwab's brokers had little idea of what they were selling and later failed to tell clients that the market was collapsing.

A criminal saga that began in December with a string of superlatives - the largest, longest and most widespread Ponzi scheme in history - ended the same way on Monday as Bernard L. Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison, the maximum for his crimes.

Three lawsuits filed on Monday provided new details about what regulators say went on inside Bernard L. Madoff's long-running Ponzi scheme, including information about who might have helped perpetuate the fraud for so long.

The trustee gathering assets for the victims of Bernard L. Madoff's fraud has sued a prominent New York City hedge fund investor, J. Ezra Merkin, to recover almost $500 million withdrawn from Madoff accounts in the last six years.

The fight against corruption in Africa is faltering as public agencies investigating wrongdoing by powerful politicians have been undermined and officials leading the charge have been dismissed, subjected to death threats and driven into exile. The search is on for more effective ways to tackle corruption, including intensified legal efforts to prosecute multinational corporations that pay the bribes and reclaim loot that African political elites have stashed abroad.

The Justice Department is increasing its prosecutions of alleged acts of foreign bribery by U.S. corporations, forcing them to take costly steps to defend against scrutiny. The crackdown under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, or FCPA -- a post-Watergate law largely dormant for decades -- now extends across five continents and penetrates entire industries.

Employees of the federal agency that last year collected more than $11 billion in royalties from oil and gas companies broke government rules and created a "culture of ethical failure" by allegedly accepting gifts from and having sex with industry representatives, the Interior Department's top watchdog said Wednesday.

Efforts by defense contractor KBR to repair hurricane-damaged Navy facilities were deemed shoddy and substandard, and one technical adviser alleged that the federal government "certainly paid twice" for many KBR projects because of "design and workmanship deficiencies," the Pentagon's inspector general reported in an audit released yesterday.

Mr. Ripp's journey from whistle-blower to defendant is another example of the long shadow cast by the AOL-Time Warner merger, now widely regarded as one of the most disastrous corporate marriages in history. It is also a cautionary tale for corporate executives who may illuminate fraudulent conduct to one government agency but then find themselves a target of another.

BAE Systems admitted yesterday that American authorities investigating corruption claims over an arms deal with Saudi Arabia had issued a series of subpoenas to senior executives, as the investigation continues to gather pace. Two bosses of the defence giant were also detained after they landed at a Houston airport last week

A former manager of Siemens, the European engineering company, testified Monday about an intricate system of slush funds and bribery at the company as the first trial on allegations of corporate corruption in Germany began.

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