Textron has agreed to pay $4.6 million in fines for bribing officials of Suddam Hussein’s government in order to acquire Iraqi contracts through the United Nations’ Oil-for-Food program. The fines are divided into the amounts of $1.15 million and $3.5 million between the Department of Justice and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, respectively. The [...]

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 [...]

Dole Food Company announced that its Costa Rican subsidiary, Fondo Nacional de Financiamento Forestal, the National Forestry Financing Fund and an entity of the Ministry of Environment and Energy of CostaRica partnered to create a carbon neutral supply chain for banana and pineapple products. The products moving from Costa Rica to North America and Europe [...]

Houston oilfield services company, Nabors Industries, became the latest oilfield services firm to launch an internal review in response to a federal investigation into possible violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). In a filing with the SEC, Nabors said, “We are reviewing certain transactions with this vendor, which provides freight forwarding and customs [...]

The Communist Party Disciplinary Committee of the Haishu district in Ningbo has underwritten the creation of an online multi-player computer game called “The Incorruptible Warrior.” The game went live last week on July 25th and it has already been downloaded over 100,000 times, with hundreds of players engaging online simultaneously. Why so popular? Because the [...]

Two months ago, we noted that British Airways (BA) had set aside $700 million in anticipation of fines from the U.S. Department of Justice on the heels of price-fixing and illegal collusion investigations (as well as to pay for editing to James Bond movies). Now the price has come in and BA and Korean Air [...]

A Long Island man pleaded guilty on Wednesday of conspiring to destroy a rival company’s product. Robert A. Schetty, III, 42, a vice president of Technic, Inc., coordinated an attempt to place hydrogen peroxide in a bath of chemicals used by rival company Rohm and Haas, Co. to test their new electroplating solution. Technic sells [...]

In a stunning surprise to most, coated-paper maker Stora Enso North America Corp. has been acquitted of price-fixing in a federal jury trial in Connecticut. The company had been indicted by DOJ in December 2006 on charges of conspiring with competitors to fix coated magazine paper prices during 2002-03. Stora’s North American division is a [...]

Swiss-based engineering group ABB announced this week that it may have violated the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) anti-bribery law after discovering suspect payments made by some employees overseas. ABB said the probe is uncovering payments of concern made in Asia, South America, and Europe (with a particular focus on Italy). The company disclosed [...]

Delta & Pine Co. (a cotton seed producer) has reached a settlement with the SEC to pay $300,000 over charges that it illegally bribed Turkish government officials in order to get documentation that reportedly would allow the company to operate in the country. According to the SEC, Delta & Pine (which has since been acquired [...]

The Department of Justice has announced that two former executives of ITXC Corporation have pleaded guilty to violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), and one former executive has been already been sentenced for the violations. Steven J. Ott and Roger Michael Young, former executives of the global telecommunications company, pleaded guilty on July [...]

We’ll start in Europe, where regulators decided to bring antitrust charges against Intel, the world’s largest computer chip maker. This capped a six-year investigation into allegations of illegal discounts to personal computer makers. If determined to be guilty, Intel faces up a fine of up to 10% of its European sales during the period of [...]

The DOJ has announced a grand jury indictment of U.S. citizen Jason Edward Steph on charges that he conspired to make corrupt payments to Nigerian officials in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). Steph, age 37, is a former executive of a subsidiary of Houston-based Willbros Group Inc. According to the indictment, Steph [...]

The U.S. Justice Department is conducting a criminal inquiry of nearly a dozen oil and oil services companies, focusing on potentially illegal payments to customs agents who provided freight forwarding and other services that extended to Nigeria. The SEC is investigating as well. According to Dow Jones, eleven oil and oil service firms received a [...]

TRACE International, a non-profit membership association (and important partner of the Ethisphere Council) that helps companies combat bribery, announced the creation of a new database that can help businesses track the prevalence of bribery attempts and requests. This new online tool, called BRIBEline, is backed by many leading organizations and companies such as Wal-Mart, International [...]

According to recent media reports, the fraud investigation into the BAE Systems over bribery charges was pulled by the government over safety concerns. British newspaper The Daily Mail obtained legal documents under the Freedom of Information Act which covered a meeting between Britain’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia (Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles) who told the director of [...]

A lawsuit against Fidelity Investments accuses the mutual fund giant of deliberately avoiding and violating portions of the U.S. Patriot Act. The whistle was blown on the company by, of all people, one of its former compliance officers. What has resulted is a mess of finger-pointing, additional lawsuits, and rush to put a seal on [...]

Former Pacific Consolidated Industries (PCI) executive Leo Winston Smith has been arrested on charges of violating the FCPA, money laundering, and tax offenses. Smith allegedly took part in a plan to bribe a United Kingdom Ministry of Defence official with the intent of obtaining high-value contracts with the U.K. Royal Air Force. From 1993 to [...]

According to media reports, another oilfield services provider, Global Industries Ltd, is conducting an internal investigation into possible illegal payments in its West African operations. Specifically the company is looking into a subsidiary’s reimbursement of certain expenses incurred by a customs agent in connection with shipments of materials and the temporary importation of vessels into [...]

This is not good. After only six months on the job, the senior official that Siemens hired as part of its effort to stamp out corruption is out of a job. Daniel Noa, the recently-hired former federal prosecutor who had led the corporation’s compliance efforts since the beginning of the year will step down by [...]

Several Nature’s Sunshine shareholders scored a partial victory when a federal judge denied most of the company’s efforts to dismiss a consolidated class action lawsuit. The lawsuit accused the company and several executives of filing misleading Sarbanes-Oxley Act certifications, Form 10-Q earnings reports and press releases with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to illicit [...]

In a rare setback for DOJ regarding FCPA prosecutions, a judge dismissed bribery charges against two American businessmen accused of trying to pay-off top Azerbaijan officials over the country’s abandoned 1990s oil privatisation programme. Judge Shira Scheindlin dismissed the bribery counts against David Pinkerton, a former managing director of AIG, and Frederic Bourke after ruling [...]

BAE Systems, the British defense company has decided to blacklist a fifth of the world’s countries as part of moves to help guarantee ethical conduct and to comply with anticorruption laws. This comes on the heels of investigations by the US DOJ over allegations that it paid huge bribes to win business in Saudi Arabia. [...]

Houston-based Eagle Global Distributors will pay the U.S. government $300,000 in a settlement stemming from charges that the logistics provider overcharged the military to ship materials to Iraq. The charges center around shipments made from January through June last year and were subcontracted through KBR Inc., the Army’s primary contractor to provide food and shelter [...]

As allegations of bribery and rumors of a DOJ investigation continue to plague BAE Systems, former partner Saab AB has publicly defended its own practices and has (wisely) distanced itself from the international arms dealer. The two companies partnered in a 1999 deal to supply 28 JAS Gripen fighters to South Africa – one of [...]