Twitter has agreed to pay a $150 million civil penalty and implement robust data-privacy compliance measures, under a settlement reached with the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The settlement awaits federal court approval. “The $150 million penalty reflects the seriousness of the allegations against Twitter,” said Read More
Britain’s Information Commissioner’s Office fined Clearview AI, a New York-based facial recognition company, 7.5 million pounds ($9.5 million) for misusing images of people in the United Kingdom and elsewhere that it collected from the Internet and social media sites to create a global online database used for facial recognition. The Read More
BNY Mellon Investment Adviser agreed to a cease-and-desist order, a censure, and a $1.5 million penalty to settle charges with the Securities and Exchange Commission for misstatements and omissions about environmental, social, and governance (ESG) considerations in making investment decisions for certain mutual funds it managed. According to the SEC’s Read More
Wells Fargo Advisors will pay a $7 million penalty and has agreed to a censure and a cease-and-desist order to resolve charges brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC charged the broker-dealer with failure to file at least 34 Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs) in a timely manner, the Read More
Seven South Korea-based companies must pay a total of $3.1 million for allegedly violating the False Claims Act by engaging in a bid-rigging conspiracy that targeted U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) contracts for construction and engineering work on U.S. military bases in South Korea. The seven companies are Korea Read More
Kraft Foods Group and Mondelēz Global, a Chicago-based snack food and beverage company, are finally paying the price for accusations of trying to manipulate the price of wheat in December 2011. An enforcement action brought by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission nearly seven years ago against the food companies has Read More
The Justice Department obtained more than $5.6 billion in settlements and judgments from civil cases involving the False Claims Act during the 2021 fiscal year. It was the second largest annual total in the history of cases of fraud and false claims against the U.S. government under the law, and Read More
The United Kingdom’s Financial Reporting Council has expanded its investigation into audits conducted by Big Four firm PricewaterhouseCoopers of Babcock International Group to include the fiscal years 2019 and 2020. The FRC was already investigating the accounting firm’s audits of the U.K. defense contractor in 2018 and 2017, after spot Read More
A new report finds that regulatory enforcement actions against financial institutions and their employees totaled $5.4 billion for non-compliance with anti-money laundering (AML) and data privacy regulations last year, in comparison to $10.6 billion in 2020, a decline of just under 50 percent. The report, issued by Fenergo, which provides Read More
The Securities and Exchange Commission appears to be making a new effort to pass clawback rules that would require executives to pay back compensation that was obtained by hitting incentive goals that were later found to be false or inaccurate. The rule was included in the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Read More
