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
A lawsuit filed by the Federal Trade Commission alleges Walmart turned a blind eye to fraudsters who used its money transfer services in its stores to scam consumers out of hundreds of millions of dollars, so that the retail giant could pocket the fees. Calling the allegations “factually flawed,” Walmart Read More
In a precedent-setting and highly controversial ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court Thursday curtailed the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. In a 6-3 decision in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, the Court ruled that Congress—not the EPA—has authority to devise emissions limits for power plants. The Read More
The multinational Russian Elites, Proxies, and Oligarchs Task Force (REPO) announced it has blocked or froze more than $30 billion worth of sanctioned Russians’ assets in its first 100 days of operation and immobilized about $300 billion worth of Russian Central Bank assets. In a joint statement released on June Read More
In the largest penalty ever imposed by the Securities and Exchange Commission against an audit firm, Ernst & Young must pay $100 million and undertake “extensive remedial measures to fix the firm’s ethical issues” to resolve charges that its audit professionals cheated on exams required to obtain and maintain Certified Read More
CafePress must enhance its data security practices, and its former owner, Residual Pumpkin, must pay $500,000 to provide redress to data breach victims, to resolve allegations the online retailer failed to secure consumers’ sensitive personal data and covered up a major data breach, the Federal Trade Commission announced on June Read More
