Wells Fargo Workers Claim Retaliation for Playing by the Rules

At least 5,300 Wells Fargo employees have been fired for ethics violations like setting up illicit accounts without customers’ knowledge to meet sales targets. Now there’s another group of aggrieved Wells Fargo workers: people who say they were fired or demoted for staying honest and falling short of sales goals they say were unrealistic.

That second group of workers, who claim that they played by the rules and were punished for it, are starting to coalesce around two lawsuits that were just filed and that seek class-action status. The first was filed in Los Angeles last week by former Wells Fargo workers who say that while their colleagues created unauthorized accounts to meet cross-selling quotas, they were penalized or terminated for refusing to do the same. read more »

Deutsche Bank: how did a beast of the banking world get into this mess?

Everything you need to know about the bind Germany’s biggest bank finds itself in, and why it matters

Deutsche Bank is facing questions about whether it can afford a penalty of $14bn (£10.5bn) from the US Department of Justice for mis-selling mortgage bonds a decade ago. Shares in Germany’s biggest bank have sunk to near-30-year lows and are trading just above €10 a share, illustrating investors’ concerns that they will be asked to bolster the institution’s coffers through a cash call.

Shareholders are in turn wondering whether the bank should have acted sooner to preserve its financial health and whether the German government will step in to prevent a collapse. read more »

Merrill Lynch Sold Some Stocks Too Fast

There are a lot of dumb obvious ways to "fat finger" your way into losing a lot of money in the stock market. You can try to buy 2,000 shares and accidentally buy 2,000,000 instead. You can try to buy 2 million dollars of Alphabet stock and accidentally buy 2 million shares -- more than $1.5 billion worth -- instead. You can try to buy 2,000 shares, not realize that your order has been sent, and then send the order again. (And again and again.) Trading is complicated and computers are fussy and you were out late last night and all those zeros tend to blur together.

Yesterday the Securities and Exchange Commission fined Bank of America Merrill Lynch $12.5 million "for maintaining ineffective trading controls that failed to prevent erroneous orders from being sent to the markets and causing mini-flash crashes," and the SEC's order lists 15 examples of Merrill fat-fingering the stock market. But what's striking about the examples is that none of them are quite that sort of dumb fat finger. Instead, they're like this: read more »

Standard Chartered shares slump amid fears over US bribery probe

Standard Chartered shares have tumbled amid investor fears the emerging markets-focused bank faces a potentially damaging US probe into bribery allegations at an Indonesian power company it controls.

Shares in the lender slumped 2.5pc to 610.1p, making it the heaviest faller in the FTSE 100, after the bank confirmed that it had referred allegations of “impropriety” at Maxpower to the “appropriate authorities”. 

It is understood the US Department of Justice is one of the bodies contacted by Standard Chartered, meaning the bank risks triggering a deferred prosecution agreement it is bound by if a DoJ investigation concludes the lender has broken the law. read more »

MMM Global: Russian ‘Ponzi scheme’ from 1990s reborn and now ‘spreading like wildfire’ in Africa

Members insist the scheme is totally transparent – but it has been repeatedly condemned by authorities

Thousands of investors are feared to have lost their money after a pyramid scheme run by a convicted Russian fraudster crashed, somewhat predictably, in Zimbabwe.

MMM Global has swept across Africa, with branches promising returns

on investment of 30 per cent a month in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Nigeria and some east African states.

It is masterminded by the former Russian politician Sergey Mavrodi, who went on the run when the original MMM – standing for Mavrodi Mondial Moneybox – collapsed in the late 1990s, losing investors an estimated $100m. read more »

From Israel via London, an online gambling scam traps thousands

NRGbinary helped punters bet on currency movements. When they lost their money, they discovered the business was hiding in the gaps between regulators.

In early 2013, a young Israeli businessman registered a web domain in London for a company called NRGbinary.com. The online options trading website offered clients the opportunity to make large amounts of money from simple bets on the movement of financial markets, stocks and commodities.

But there were a few peculiarities to the company. While it was initially registered in Britain, NRGbinary was run from Israel and sold its products to clients in the Middle East, Canada and South Africa. Within months it had shifted its registration to Cyprus and then to the Seychelles.

Within two years, according to London lawyers and scores of former clients, around a dozen of whom spoke to Reuters, NRGbinary and other companies linked to the same parent group had defrauded hundreds of people out of anywhere between $10,000 and several hundreds of thousands of dollars – millions in all. read more »

LIA on track with multi-million dollar litigations to recover wealth of the Libyan people

Things are uncertain at the moment, even by Libya’s standards. Key terminals in Libya’s eastern and western oil facilities have been held hostage for years, with oil production at a minimum. Oil exports, on which the economy sorely relies, are at a virtual standstill. The country’s liquidity crisis is ongoing. Roads, hospitals and other key infrastructure are in desperate need of upgrading. Kidnappings are rife.

In most countries, any one of these problems would be cause for major concern. In Libya, we have to contend with all of them at the same time.

Amidst these grey clouds, however, some rays of sunshine are beginning to emerge on the horizon. The National Oil Corporation has recently retaken the eastern oil facilities and terminals, and export of crude oil is resuming. And the Libyan Investment Authority (LIA) is making great strides in its efforts to recover funds that our country badly needs. read more »

Legislation Would Expand Whistleblower Protections for DOE Employees

Three Senators introduced legislation this week that would expand whistleblower protections for whistleblowers at the Department of Energy.

One of the primary objectives of the bill is to add whistleblower disclosures about waste, fraud and abuse to legally protected whistleblower activities at DOE. Currently, whistleblower protections under the Energy Reorganization Act are limited to disclosing safety violations. read more »

A New Debate Over Pricing the Risks of Climate Change

Some companies, including Exxon Mobil, say the economics of climate change are too hard to predict for them to give investors hard numbers about the business impact of global warming.

Federal regulators may disagree and are considering requiring Exxon to do just that for the value of its oil reserves.

Now a long-shot legislative effort by a Florida congressman to prevent such a move by the federal government has become an unexpected flash point in the battle over disclosing climate-related risks — with potentially hundreds of billions of dollars in the balance. read more »

Andrew Cuomo and the Corruption of Albany

Andrew Cuomo, New York’s governor, can be grateful that the lowest moment of his tenure took place on a busy news day last week. While the nation was preoccupied with the Presidential election and the aftermath of a police shooting in Charlotte, Cuomo’s best friend, who has also been one of his closest political advisers, was arrested on charges related to what is allegedly a seedy corruption scheme that took place right under the governor’s nose.

the Buffalo Billion project, a plan to revitalize that troubled city—is beset by corruption and self-dealing read more »

Ex-HBOS Bankers Accused of Getting Travel, Escorts in Fraud

Defendants mismanaged troubled businesses for their own gain

Participants used cash and high-class escorts as rewards

Ex-HBOS Plc bankers accepted expensive gifts, luxurious foreign travel and high-class escorts to establish relationships that allowed co-conspirators to take control of troubled businesses in a fraud that lost the U.K. bank 245 million pounds ($317 million), prosecutors said.

David Mills, a turnaround consultant, is on trial in London, accused of establishing a “corrupt relationship” with Lyndon Scourfield, the lead director of HBOS’s impaired assets division. They used Mills’s firm between 2003 and 2007 to take over ailing businesses, increasing the companies’ debts to unsustainable levels and commanding huge fees, prosecution lawyer Brian O’Neill said. read more »

'German James Bond' Werner Mauss on trial for tax evasion

A former top spy in Germany has gone on trial on charges of tax evasion.

Werner Mauss, nicknamed the "German James Bond", is accused of hiding more than €15m ($17m, £13m) in offshore accounts. He denies any wrongdoing and says the accounts were set up by intelligence agencies to fund secret operations. Mr Mauss, 76, says on his website that as a spy he stopped a Mafia attempt to poison Pope Benedict and freed hostages held captive by Colombian rebels

For a long time, there were no pictures of Werner Mauss The retired agent appeared in court wearing a navy parka with the hood pulled over his head. read more »

Former Chief Executive of South Carolina Hospital Pays $1 Million and Agrees to Exclusion to Settle Claims Related to Illegal Payments to Referring Physicians

The Department of Justice announced today that it has reached a $1 million settlement with Ralph J. Cox III, the former chief executive officer of Sumter, South Carolina-based Tuomey Healthcare System, for his involvement in the hospital’s illegal Medicare and Medicaid billings for services referred by physicians with whom the hospital had improper financial relationships. read more »