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 [...]

Last year the European Commission levied billions in fines against cartels in the glass industry, this year it raided companies in the special glass sector under suspicion of cartel activity. The EC didn’t reveal the names of the companies it raided, but said special glass sector refers to companies that produce glass “used for [...]

In April, French President Nicolas Sarkozy ordered investigations into Liechtenstein bank accounts used by Michelin, Total and Adidas as tax havens. The move, intended to coincide with the recent G20 agreement to curb international tax shelters, began four months ago and was focused on accounts held by subsidiaries of the large companies.
Michelin and Total [...]

An amusing story in the Times Online this week reports that uber-advertising company WPP and its former Italian director, Marco Benatti, have privately settled an ongoing dispute involving libel, wrongful termination and interoffice romance.

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

China knocked the United Kingdom out of the top five countries considered most attractive for investment in renewable energy, according to a quarterly report released by Ernst & Young. In fact, the two countries

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 [...]

Though the two transatlantic rivals may be bitterly fighting for the rights to a U.S. government contract, Boeing and Airbus do see eye-to-eye on one critical issue: cutting the carbon dioxide emissions from their planes. Both companies are aggressively working towards developing

A new law in the United Kingdom will protect employees from sexual harassment beyond just coworkers and bosses, now extending to “customers, suppliers and others they encounter in the course of their work,” according to a story in the UK’s Guardian. Well, technically the punishment still goes to employers if they are aware of [...]

Becoming a whistle-blower is now a financially sound career move, thanks to the UK’s Office of Fair Trade (OFT). The British watch dog announced last Friday that it will offer as much as £100,000 for information leading to the discovery and dismantling of illegal corporate cartels. The OFT will offer the rewards for [...]

Will there ever be an end to the Oil-for-Food abuses? Flowserve Corporation announced last Thursday that it will pay nearly $10.6 million to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice for violating the United Nation’s Iraq Oil-for-Food humanitarian program. A Dutch and French-based subsidiary of the company, Flowserve [...]

The large percentage of Germans that regularly avoid taxes isn’t terribly surprising, considering the nation’s top income tax rate is 45 percent and the tax laws are notoriously confusing, according to Bloomberg. Nevertheless, the problem is huge for the country and getting worse. The issue is making a lot of headlines right now, [...]

H&M is the second largest retailer in Europe and has stores around the world, and now it no longer accepts wool from Australia. This came about after the Australian wool industry showed signs of hesitation on its plan to stop mulesing sheep by 2010. Though H&M admittedly uses only a “very small [...]

Wm Morrison, the UK supermarket chain, is suing the UK’s Office of Fair Trade (OFT) for libel after the OFT claimed Morrison was allegedly part of a 2002 milk cartel, and is demanding a judicial review of how the OFT is handling the case. Several food companies have come under investigation recently on charges [...]

Air France today announced a pledge to spend $3 billion annually (until 2020) to cut carbon emissions and noise levels for its aircraft. The company is also hoping to cut fuel consumption by 15 to 20 percent within five years. You can see a bunch of other numbers over

Chevron announced yesterday it will be giving its largest single donation in company history to the United Nations backed Global Fund, a program that helps to fight AIDS and other infectious diseases throughout the world. This also marks the largest single donation to the Fund by a company, which makes Chevron the Global Fund’s [...]

The European engineering firm Siemens just learned that it might be fined as much as €4 billion (close to $6 billion) by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission as the result of a large bribery investigation that began in 2006. The number is about three times the amount of bribes that were uncovered [...]

Norway may have been beaten to the punch by Vatican City, but in a long-standing tradition of doing things better than the rest of us, the “Land of the Midnight Sun” clearly hasn’t given up its goal of becoming carbon neutral before everyone else. Originally slated to become a “zero-emission” state by 2050, the [...]

Several major pharmaceutical companies were raided by European authorities yesterday as part of an investigation into whether or not they colluded to keep prices of their drugs high after their patents had expired. The UK’s Financial Times reports that Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, AstraZeneca and Sanofi-Aventis were some of the companies

Jonathan Evans, the head of the UK’s MI5, recently sent a letter out to 300 British business leaders warning them to be wary of a possible Chinese espionage attack. Since then, the UK’s Times has reported that both Rolls-Royce and Shell have already been hit by “sustained spying assaults” from Chinese government-backed hackers. [...]

conradblack.jpgConvicted of defrauding Hollinger International last July, Canadian-turned-British media mogul Conrad Black was sentenced yesterday to six and a half years in prison, fined $125,000 and forced to forfeit $6.1 million dollars. Mr. Black, aka Lord Black of Crossharbour, was allowed to keep his Florida home despite prosecutors’ requests to the

Stolt-Nielsen’s amnesty has been reinstated and the company’s Chief Executive, Niels G. Stolt-Nielsen, is “pleased” that he doesn’t have to go to jail – a fate suffered by three top brass of the company’s co-conspirators in a 2002 antitrust case. This is the latest (and final?) development in an ongoing case of “he said, [...]

She’s mad as hell and she’s not going to take it anymore…and now she’s going to “fight like hell” to do something about it. Apparently a record-breaking fine of $1.3 billion against elevator cartels didn’t get the message across as clear as she’d like (note: fines levied against cartels could be as steep as [...]