Last year Stryker Corp came under fire for illegal payments to U.S. doctors. This year, that might be topped. The company announced in an SEC filing last month that it is being investigated by the Department of Justice for “possible violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.” While not many specific details have been announced [...]

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 an 18 [...]

Alcoa was sued yesterday by Aluminum Bahrain BSC in a U.S. federal court for allegations of overcharging, fraud and bribery. Aluminum Bahrain BSC, better known as Alba, says it was overcharged by Alcoa for alumina (pictured), a key ingredient in creating aluminum. The company says it paid excesses of about $65 million per year 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 Pompes SAS, [...]

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, just days [...]

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 of [...]

A Florida man has been found guilty of dishing out company trade secrets from his former employer, Alpha Mining Systems, to competitors. Alpha, a global manufacturer of industrial mining tires, won a $19.7 million judgment against Sam Vance, the company’s former sales and marketing manager. The judge ruled that Vance gave competitors more than enough [...]

The World Bank announced it won’t be giving any more money to Lahmeyer International after the company was found guilty of bribing officials responsible for lending contracts for the Lesotho Highlands Water Project, a multi-billion dollar operation. The German engineering firm was found guilty of fraud by the government of Lesotho and fined

It seems the chemical and pharmaceutical industries haven’t exactly been the most ethically-minded these days. Both BASF SE and Bayer AG announced they will begin an internal probe into allegations by the World Bank that the two companies engaged in a price fixing scheme for an anti-mosquito pesticide sold

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 coming [...]

Choco-giants Hershey, Nestle, Cadbury and Mars have come under scrutiny from the U.S. and Canada over allegations of price fixing. The companies have already handed over documents to the Canadian authorities, and Bloomberg reported back in December ’07 that U.S. antitrust investigators were looking into the allegations as well. While no government charges

This week, the Competition Commission of Singapore (CCS) issued its first ever bid-rigging fine to six pest control firms. The companies were found guilty of coordinating their bids for six extermination contracts and rotating which firm would offer the lowest. They were caught after email exchanges between senior managers of the firms were included among [...]

Bribery, according to the DOJ. Lucent technologies helped wrap up a DOJ investigation on Tuesday by agreeing to pay $1 million for FCPA violations. From 2000 to 2003 the company reportedly spent over $10 million on about 315 various trips for approximately 1,000 Chinese government officials. This included all expense paid trips to Disneyland, Universal [...]

Staples and HP have been sued by a California man, who accuses the two of price-fixing. Ranjit Bedi claims that HP approached Staples, asking that the company stop selling third party ink cartridges for HP printers. In turn, Bedi claims, Staples was given over $100 million in market development funds to only sell HP ink [...]

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 [...]

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 10 [...]

David Brooks, the former CEO of DHB Industries, was recently indicted by the Department of Justice for insider trading, fraud, obstruction of justice and tax evasion. Even after all those charges, the most gripping piece of information is what Brooks allegedly spent company money on, including $101,500 on an armored vehicle for himself and his [...]

A major, two-year investigation into an alleged price fixing scheme in the land down under came to a close on Tuesday after Richard Pratt, Australia’s third richest man, admitted his role in the whole thing. What started as a hotel lunch in 2000 between Pratt, chairman of Visy, and Russel Jones, former CEO of Visy’s [...]

While Neelie Kroes and the hard-hitting men and women of the European Commission are busy bruising up large corporations with fines for antitrust violations, it seems the United States is involved in its own crackdown. They’re on a mission to remind everyone that the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act doesn’t just apply to American

Thomas Barnett, the head of the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division who was recently thrust in the spotlight for his protest of the EU decision to throw out Microsoft’s antitrust appeal, further explained his position during a recent speech at Georgetown University.

In 2007 the European Commission issed the largest fine in the EU’s history- a whopping €990 million (that’s $1.3 billion, folks). In spite of recent criticism, an EC spokesman revealed that the Commission intends to continue increasing fines. As EC spokesman Jonathan Todd explained, the Commission has “increased the level of fines . . . [...]

After Microsoft’s sound legal defeat at the hands of the EU’s Court of First Instance on Monday, experts debate the future impact and role of the European Commission (EC) in world business. The conflict stretches from legal experts in support of the ruling to U.S. government officials such as Thomas Barnett, the Assistant Attorney General [...]

The Competition Commission recently demanded confidential information from supermarket chains Tesco and Asda in the form of emails delivered to their suppliers. The demand comes in conjunction with an investigation alleging the two companies exerted ‘undue pressure’ on suppliers. Asda alone released 11 million emails to the Commission. The Commission announced last January that there [...]

Casual Male won a $1.5 million settlement against both a former associate and a competitor. A jury determined that Robert Yarbrough broke his contract with the company after he violated non-competition obligations and leaked company secrets. He was charged with $1.1 million in damages. Westport Big & Tall, a competitor of Casual Male, was charged [...]

It’s really hard to close the barn door AFTER the cow has left, but that is what the FTC is trying to do. The Federal Trade Commission accidentally disclosed confidential trade secrets of Whole Foods yesterday in a court filing. At issue was that in trying to protect competitive secrets, court officials didn’t sufficiently “black [...]