Fyre Festival Was Buried Under Millions in Debt Before It Even Began

First ticket holders sued. Now investors who backed the doomed millennial extravaganza want their money back.

In the weeks before the Fyre Festival, organizers borrowed as much as $7 million in a last-minute bid to fund the doomed Bahamas music showcase, according to documents reviewed by Bloomberg News.

While recriminations and lawsuits multiply over the event’s now-infamous collapse, almost $1 million is still unaccounted for, and it’s unclear exactly how the rest was spent. Meanwhile, there’s the open question of whether thousands of ticket-holders will get refunds, or if employees of the startup behind the festival, Fyre Media Inc., will be fully paid. read more »

Philadelphia Sues Wells Fargo Over Alleged Predatory Lending

he City of Philadelphia has sued Wells Fargo & Co, accusing the largest U.S. mortgage lender of predatory lending, which violates the federal Fair Housing Act.

Monday's lawsuit came two weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court said cities can sue banks for alleged discriminatory practices that cause a disproportionately large number of defaults by minority borrowers, and harm to cities themselves.

The lawsuit adds to legal woes afflicting San Francisco-based Wells Fargo, which has since September been beset by a scandal over its employees' creation of unauthorized customer accounts to meet sales goals.

Foreign Bribery Self-Reporting Up Under Justice Dept. Program

A Justice Department pilot program offering leniency to companies that self-report violations of a federal foreign bribery law has led to more of them coming forward, a top DOJ official said May 12.

In the program’s first year, 22 companies voluntarily disclosed violations, up from 13 the year before, Andrew Weissmann, chief of DOJ’s Fraud Division, said during a Practising Law Institute panel in New York that was also webcast. “It’s not a huge universe,” he said.

The program kicked off in April 2016 and was originally scheduled for a year, but the Justice Department announced in March that it will continue indefinitely.

The ex-employee who sued Snapchat for allegedly inflating metrics wants ‘whistleblower’ protection and a trial by jury

A former employee who claims Snap Inc. lied to investors ahead of its initial public offering has escalated his lawsuit against the company and is seeking protection under whistleblower laws.

Anthony Pompliano, who served as Snap's growth lead for three weeks in 2015, is transferring his suit against the company from state to federal court, demanding a trial by jury and seeking damages of at least $10 million, according to a complaint seen by Business Insider that was filed Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.

Pompliano's lawsuit names Spiegel, Snap Director of Revenue Brian Theisen, and Chief Strategy Officer Imran Khan as defendants.

Additionally, Pompliano is filing for protection under the whistleblower provisions of the Dodd-Frank finance reform law. Those provisions apply to company employees who have come forward with information under the reasonable belief that their company committed fraud against shareholders. read more »

The Wizard of Lies’s Brutal Portrait of Bernie Madoff

The HBO film, starring Robert De Niro, finds little to love in its infamous protagonist.

Over and over again in The Wizard of Lies, the director Barry Levinson pushes his camera as close as he can to Bernie Madoff’s face, searching for flickers of emotion. As played by Robert De Niro, Madoff is taciturn and even-tempered—at least, after he reveals his part in the largest financial fraud in American history. It’s this devastating sense of calm and acceptance that fascinates Levinson most in his exploration of Madoff’s life, which almost entirely focuses on his experiences after he admitted to running a decades-long Ponzi scheme in 2008 and was turned over to the police by his children. Surely, there has to be remorse or, at the very least, anger about how things fell apart?

In the end, Levinson finds very little at all—but that’s less unsatisfying than it sounds. This is not a film that offers a simple explanation for Madoff’s long-running fraud, nor is it one that strives to find some sympathetic angle on him, even in the wake of his conviction and the suicide of his son Mark. It’s a long, moody piece that seeks only to depict Madoff’s frustrating opaqueness and the destruction he left in his wake. The Wizard of Lies, which airs Saturday on HBO, doesn’t try to either understand or humanize Madoff, but all the same it manages to be an intimate, unsettling portrait of a borderline sociopath. read more »