The European Union has begun an investigation into whether or not Standard & Poor’s, the international credit rating company, has violated antitrust laws by overcharging its customers for the use of Cusip numbers. Cusip numbers, nine digit numbers assigned to companies’ securities in order to help track trades, are sold to companies by Standard [...]

President Obama today signed into law the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act of 2009 (FERA), a bill that extensively ramps up anti-fraud measures, including authorizing new funding to fight fraud, adding protections to federal whistle-blowers and expanding the power of

Earlier this month, Governor Bill Richardson decided to withdraw his nomination for commerce secretary in order to, in his explanation, avoid making a spectacle out of the confirmation process. The unnecessary distraction, he feared, would come about

Team of Rivals? Not Quite. In response to a series of 2007 FTC antitrust suits, Whole Foods has asked 96 of its U.S.-based competitors to hand over sensitive company data. John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, believes the information will help fight the 29 separate lawsuits it is facing – one for

The European Commission announced on Wednesday that it had levied the fourth largest fine against a cartel in the history of the EU. This time, it came out to €676 million and went against the wax industry.

The ongoing Alstom bribery probe has already expanded to at least four continents and possibly uncovered hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes, but insult was added to injury when Swiss prosecutors announced that Alstom’s former compliance officer was arrested for operating a slush fund

The U.S. Department of Justice announced new Departmental guidelines today that repeal restrictions to attorney-client privilege between corporations and their employees embroiled in federal cases. These new guidelines will

Twenty executives from the Egyptian cement industry were fined $1.87 million each after being found guilty of

Saturday marked the commencement of a trial in Southern China for the former president of Guangfa Securities, China’s sixth largest stock brokerage firm, over allegations of insider trading that began in 2006. At that time, Chinese authorities accused

Bangladesh’s Anti-Corruption Commission reported yesterday that it uncovered a number of its own officials taking bribes while on the job, where they were

Bad news came to McKesson Corp. yesterday in the form of a ruling by U.S. District Judge Patti B. Saris. Judge Saris certified a number of 2005 suits by the New England Carpenters Health Benefits Fund as class action, and allowed them to

A new report released today in Berlin by Transparency International (TI) ranks 34 countries in regard to their overall corruption-fighting efforts, with some surprising results. The bottom four? Britain, Italy, Japan and Canada. According to TI, the four countries had “practically no investigations or extremely

Last year, we wrote about insider trading allegations against a number of current and former European Aeronautic Defense & Space (EADS) executives. This has been a huge issue in Europe for quite some time, as EADS is one of the largest defense contractors in the world and the parent of Airbus. The controversy [...]

In 2005, Adidas AG sued Collective Brands, Inc., parent company of Payless ShoeSource, for selling shoes that have a triple-striped design similar to that of Adidas’ products. In early May, a federal jury in Oregon awarded Adidas nearly

Cadbury products will no longer be sold by India’s largest retailer, Future Group, as Future’s chief executive Kishore Biyani has accused the nation’s largest chocolate manufacturer of price discrimination. He has accused Cadbury of cutting

What started off as a media dream story (with the words “Rupert Murdoch,” “employs” and “hacker” all in the same headline) ended on a very anticlimactic, and somewhat humorous, note. Readers might remember the DISH Network lawsuit that hoped to receive nearly $1 billion in damages from

A Portland jury awarded plaintiffs $28 million today in a now four-year-old class-action antitrust lawsuit against North American lumber company Weyerhaeuser. The jury said that the company violated antitrust laws through high prices and buying unnecessary amounts of lumber to prevent their competition from getting

EchoStar Communications, the parent company of DISH Network, filed a corporate espionage lawsuit against News Corp’s NDS Group, alleging that the firm hired one of the “two best hackers in the world” to hack into DISH’s satellite network and steal the company’s security codes, according to a report by Reuters. NDS, which provides various [...]

A new bill that will further regulate the federal acquisition process, called The Close the Contractor Fraud Loophole Act, was approved by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee last week, according to a report by Federal Computer Week, and is now

More proof that price-fixing can take place in any industry: the owner of Adult Fire, an Australian company that puts on various X-rated strip shows for men and women, sued two of its Sydney rivals, Bombshells and Sex Bomb Promotions, for price-fixing. Sadly for Adult Fire the case was “quickly dismissed” after Bombshells and [...]

The CEO of Denver-based Grynberg Productions is trying a new strategy to escape possible FCPA violations: suing a bunch of his rivals. This month Jack Grynberg, the eponymous chairman of the oil company, sued British oil company BP, BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward, Former BP Chief Executive John Browne, Norway’s Statoil and others, accusing [...]

The South African Competition Commission decided that there have been so many reports of price fixing involving producers of bread, milk and other food items that they’re just going to go ahead and probe the entire South African food industry, according to a report by sabcnews.com. The Commission will focus primarily

Who says random airport searches don’t work? United States customs officials discovered that Hanjuan Jin, 37, a China-born U.S. citizen, was allegedly trying to leak confidential trade secrets from her former U.S. employer to a China-based rival when they searched her luggage at

Two weeks ago, in the last edition of Ethisphere Magazine we rated and ranked the ethics programs of some of the largest U.S. government contractors. IBM was

Either investigative techniques used to uncover FCPA violations are improving, more companies are doing it or it’s just getting more attention from the DOJ. But whatever the reason, FCPA cases are a dime a dozen these days. The most recent alleged violator: Shell Oil. The company is being looked into by the Department of Justice [...]