The Securities and Exchange Commission has issued its largest-ever award, a staggering $279 million, to a whistleblower whose information and assistance led to the successful enforcement of SEC and related actions, the regulatory agency said Friday in a statement. This is the highest award in the SEC’s whistleblower program’s history, Read More
A global measure of corruption is sounding the alarm that not only is the level of bribery and corruption not improving around the world it is worsening in several countries, including in such developed nations as Canada, Austria, and the United Kingdom. The 2022 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI), released this Read More
The 2021 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) released by Transparency International shows that corruption levels remain at a standstill worldwide, with 86 percent of countries making little to no progress in the last 10 years. Nearly two-thirds of nations scored below 50 on the 100-point scale this year. The largest declines Read More
Uber Technologies recently entered a non-prosecution agreement (NPA) with the Department of Justice resulting from the ridesharing company’s coverup of a massive 2016 data breach. Under the terms of the NPA, Uber accepted responsibility for its conduct in the wake of the 2016 data breach, specifically for concealing the data Read More
Three major poultry producers—Cargill, Sanderson Farms, and Wayne Farms—entered into proposed consent decrees with the Department of Justice to resolve allegations that they engaged in anticompetitive practices by secretly exchanging wage and benefits information about their plant workers in violation of the Sherman Act. They also agree to pay a Read More
An independent review into the United Kingdom’s Serious Fraud Office’s handling of the Unaoil corruption case was made public this week, providing damning details about the inner workings of the enforcement agency and its embarrassing bungling of the matter that resulted in three acquittals. The review was commissioned by the Read More
Equitable Financial Life Insurance Co. agreed to pay a $50 million civil penalty, which will be distributed to harmed investors, to settle charges that it provided misleading account statements to about 1.4 million investors. The Securities and Exchange Commission, which pursued the fraud case, said that the statements included materially Read More
The U.K. Financial Reporting Council announced July 18 it has imposed financial and non-financial sanctions, as well as a “severe reprimand,” against Grant Thornton UK and a former audit partner of the firm for failures during 2016 and 2018 audits of the financial statements of British retail company Sports Direct Read More
Bank of America has been ordered to pay $225 million in civil penalties and redress to harmed consumers for engaging in abusive practices when it denied consumers access to unemployment benefits on prepaid debit cards at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. In a separate case, Bank of America is Read More
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission issued two separate orders on July 5, simultaneously filing and settling charges against two separate swap dealers for failing to comply with their reporting obligations in violation of the Commodity Exchange Act (CEA) and CFTC regulations. In the first action, the CFTC ordered BNP Paribas, Read More
