Newsweek published its first annual Green Rankings in September, a list of the S&P 500 companies ranked and scored by the magazine for their environmental impact and reputation. The list, which reportedly took 18 months to compile, was created with the help of environmental research groups, including KLD Research & Analytics, Trucost and CorporateRegister.com. The [...]

A federal appellate court ruled today that Taco Bell, and not its ad agency TBWA, is responsible for the $42 million payment to the original creators of the now famous Taco Bell Chihuahua mascot.

Regular Ethisphere readers are aware of a number of issues that have affected Johnson & Johnson in the past, namely the (still ongoing) problems with their Ortho Evra birth control patch. Along those lines, Bloomberg published an interesting story claiming that Johnson & Johnson has paid – at a minimum – $68.7 million in private [...]

Cephalon agreed to pay $425 million on Monday in order to settle criminal and civil charges filed against the company for the way it marketed three of its drugs – Actiq (a painkiller), Gabitril (an epilepsy drug) and Provigil (a sleeping drug), according to

The sentence came in yesterday for a New York man who plead guilty to sending spam email messages to over 1.2 million AOL users in a way that avoided being noticed by the company’s spam filter. The messages were used by

A Thai Member of Parliament (MP) and a newspaper critic face millions of dollars in damages and significant prison time after being sued for libel by Tesco, the UK’s largest retailer, according to a story by the Guardian Newspaper. Both were sued for saying that Tesco, known as Tesco Lotus in Thailand, is expanding too [...]

Thanks to a settlement announced last Thursday, 3M Company will have to change the labels of their tape products and pony up nearly $700,000 for allegedly misrepresenting the physical dimensions of their tape by six percent. 3M was accused of mislabeling its products by Fresno, California’s Division of Measure Standards, which brought suit against

Seven years ago H. Dean Steinke, a rising employee and former district sales manager for Merck, put his career on hold by blowing the whistle on his former employee’s unethical marketing practices. Today, his conscience finally paid off when Merck agreed to pay $671 million to settle accusations of overcharging government programs such as Medicare, [...]

Stop the presses! Al Gore, the Sierra Club, and environmentalists everywhere are going to need to find a new hobby because global warming has just been stopped. Limousine Eighteen, the international “ground transportation company,” has purchased one hybrid SUV for their fleet of ground vehicles. This was revealed to the world in the form of [...]

Two former sales representatives for Amgen have brought suit against the company, alleging it used questionable and illegal sales tactics to help push sales of its psoriasis-treating drug, Enbrel. The suit alleges that Amgen pressured its sales team to 1) obtain physician’s records for patients suffering from psoriasis and 2) encourage insurance companies to reimburse [...]

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 [...]

Although this story is unique in and of itself, more interesting is what it brought to light: there are actually federal guidelines in place for what constitutes a “stew.” The USDA outlines the official government recipe for beef stew with language that seems better suited for a Monty Python sketch. “The beef stew shall contain [...]

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), an independent body created by the U.K.’s advertising industry to self-regulate the rules in the advertising codes, has discovered many companies are advertising unproven claims of environmental sustainability.

Church & Dwight Co., Inc., parent company of the Nair line of products, unveiled a new hair removal product earlier this year aimed at 10 to 15 year olds. The product is called Nair Pretty and has been advertised in magazines such as CosmoGirl and Seventeen in order to reach “first-time hair removers.” The company [...]

Italy’s antitrust authority has fined Bristol-Myers Squibb $3.2 million for illegal collusion with competitors in the colostomy bag market (competitors Coloplast SpA, Hollister SpA, and B Braun Milano SpA were also fined lesser amounts for similar anti-competitive behaviour). At issue is that the four companies (which control 95% of the colostomy bag market in the [...]

After months of closed-door negotiating, pharma giant Johnson & Johnson filed a lawsuit Wednesday against The American Red Cross claiming that the Red Cross violated trademark laws by using the red cross symbol on certain commercial products. Although the American Red Cross was created in 1881, while Johnson & Johnson started using the trademark in [...]

Securities regulators have announced a $6.1 million fine against Morgan Stanley for overcharging customers who purchased bonds from the firm. Morgan Stanley allegedly overcharged customers of its retail brokerage unit by $59 million for bond sales. According to FINRA, the industry’s regulatory body, an acceptable “mark-up” is typically around 5%. However, Morgan Stanley charged mark-ups [...]

EU regulators said Thursday that they had charged makers of an industrial bleach (sodium chlorate) with illegal price-fixing and running a cartel. Sodium chlorate is mainly used as a bleaching agent in the pulp and paper sector. Both Finland’s Kemira Oyj and Netherlands-based Akzo Nobel NV confirmed that they had received the charges. If found [...]

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 [...]

We are filing this one under the category of “Careful Communications” as the Pakistani government is reporting that five people were killed in Kararchi several days ago as a direct consequence of falling billboards in the city which collapsed due to strong winds… Police confirmed the deaths which were caused when at least twenty billboards [...]

With great fanfare yesterday, Xerox Corporation unveiled a first-of-its-kind paper for digital printing that uses half as many trees as traditional paper, while lowering the cost to mail printed material. At the core of the development are Xerox’s technical achievements, which have increased the amount of a tree that can be used (doubling the yield [...]

As reported in the Dallas Business Journal, a group of dairy farmers has filed a series of lawsuits against Dean Foods and several other companies, including Dairy Farmers of America and National Dairy Holdings, accusing them of illegal price fixing and monopolization. The lawsuit says that, as early as 2001, Dean and the others began [...]

Online virtual worlds like “Second Life” continue to grow at a rapid clip. Commerce, business meetings, and other far racier ‘encounters’ are becoming more commonplace in these virtual worlds. To help protect its reputation, IBM announced this week that it was establishing a code of conduct to govern its more than 5,000 employees who have [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]