Wal-Mart Balks at Paying $600-Million-Plus in Bribery Case

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is butting heads with the U.S. government over how to wrap up a long-running foreign corruption investigation.

Officials have proposed that the world’s biggest retailer pay at least $600 million to resolve probes by the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission into whether it bribed government officials in markets from Mexico to India and China, according to three people familiar with the matter. The retailer has rebuffed the government’s request, two of them said.

Such a settlement would rank among the largest in four decades under a U.S. law against bribing foreign officials to obtain business. read more »

Novartis to pay $35 million to settle charges of illegally promoting a drug for infants

Novartis has agreed to pay $35 million to settle charges of illegally promoting a prescription skin cream for use with infants and toddlers. The deal marks the second time in the past year the drug maker has struck a deal with US authorities to resolve allegations of improperly marketing its medicines.

The agreement, announced on Wednesday, stems from a whistleblower lawsuit filed by a former Novartis sales representative, who accused the company of deliberately trying to widen the market for Elidel by encouraging prescriptions for children younger than 24 months, even though the medicine was not approved for that patient population. At one point, regulators issued a warning about the risk of cancer in small children. read more »

U.S. top court leans toward making insider trading prosecutions easier

U.S. Supreme Court justices hearing a closely watched insider trading case indicated on Wednesday they were likely to make it easier for prosecutors to pursue such charges against traders, but questioned where to draw the line.

The appeal by Bassam Salman, an Illinois man convicted after making nearly $1.2 million trading on information that came from his brother-in-law, was the first insider trading case to come before the justices in two decades. read more »

Because Congress never defined what constitutes insider trading, courts and regulators have been forced to supply the answer.

Yavapai Regional Medical Center to Pay $5.85 Million to Resolve False Claims Allegations

Yavapai Regional Medical Center (Yavapai), an Arizona not-for-profit community health system, has agreed to pay the United States $5.85 million to resolve claims that it violated the False Claims Act by misreporting data about the hours worked by its employees on its annual cost reports, which improperly inflated the amount of money it received from the Medicare program. read more »

Credit Suisse Paying $90 Million Penalty for Misrepresenting Performance Metric

The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced that Credit Suisse AG has agreed to pay a $90 million penalty and admit wrongdoing to settle charges that it misrepresented how it determined a key performance metric of its wealth management business.

A former executive agreed to settle charges that he was a cause of Credit Suisse’s violations. read more »

Accountant Sentenced to 48 Months in Prison for Role in $50 Million Fraud Scheme

An accountant who participated in and attempted to cover up a $50 million New Orleans-area Medicare fraud scheme was sentenced today to 48 months in prison for his involvement in the scheme. read more »

How the owners of Fidelity get richer at everyday investors’ expense

The billionaire Johnson clan has a private venture capital arm that competes directly for lucrative deals with the Fidelity funds in which millions of Americans put their nest eggs. Corporate governance specialists say the arrangement poses a troubling conflict of interest. read more »

Banks must face U.S. silver rigging lawsuit

Silver investors may pursue a lawsuit accusing two major banks of conspiring to fix prices and exploit market distortions, affecting $30 billion traded each year in the precious metal and related instruments, a federal judge has ruled.

U.S. District Judge Valerie Caproni in Manhattan rejected efforts by Bank of Nova Scotia ("ScotiaBank") and HSBC Holdings Plc to dismiss the lawsuit, in a decision made public on Tuesday. read more »

Chicago suspends Wells Fargo from city business for a year

The Chicago City Council on Wednesday approved a one-year suspension for Wells Fargo & Co from city business in the wake of its scandal over phony accounts.

The ban includes bond underwriting, brokerage, trustee and other services the bank has provided to Chicago. Wells Fargo has earned $19.5 million in fees from Chicago since 2005.

Wells Fargo staff opened checking, savings and credit card accounts without customer say-so for years to satisfy managers' demand for new business, according to a $190 million settlement with U.S. regulators and California prosecutors reached on Sept. 8. The bank said it fired 5,300 employees over the issue. read more »

Credit Suisse to Pay $90 Million for Padding Private Bank Assets

Credit Suisse Group AG agreed to pay a $90 million penalty to settle U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission claims that the bank misrepresented how much money it attracted to its private bank.

Employees inflated new client assets managed from the fourth quarter of 2011 to 2012 to meet sales targets, which painted a rosier picture of the bank for investors, according to a statement from the regulator Wednesday. The Zurich-based lender admitted that pressure from managers led to the securities violations. Former Chief Operating Officer Rolf Boegli, who didn’t admit or deny the findings, agreed to pay an $80,000 penalty for allegedly pushing employees to misrepresent the assets despite their concerns. read more »

NJ Justices to Hear State's Appeal of Whistleblower Deadline Ruling

The New Jersey Supreme Court agreed on Sept. 23 to hear the attorney general's appeal of an Appellate Division ruling that prosecutors may not issue administrative subpoenas in whistleblower lawsuits after the statutory deadline has passed to either intervene or decline to participate.

The court is not expected to hear arguments in the case for several months at the earliest.

A three-judge Appellate Division panel, in a published ruling issued last March, overturned a decision by an Essex County judge that would have enforced the attorney general's subpoenas to a company that manages health benefit plans for public-sector workers, as well as two of its former senior executives.

Medco Health Solutions Inc., based in Franklin Lakes, which is now a subsidiary of pharmacy manager Express Scripts Holding Co. of St. Louis, Missouri, is accused in a qui tam lawsuit of defrauding New Jersey, California, New York and Florida as well as the U.S. government out of millions of dollars by withholding discounts from sales of AstraZeneca drugs that were meant to be passed along to clients.

Aegis Oil Agrees To Pay $41M To End SEC Suit

Texas oil company Aegis Oil LLC has agreed to pay $41 million to end a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuit claiming the company and its CEO sold about $35 million worth of unregistered securities and lied to investors, according to papers filed Tuesday in Florida federal court. read more »