Dozens of men and women accused of the rape and abuse of children have gone on trial in one of the biggest court cases in France’s legal history. The trial, which involves 66 defendants and is expected to last four months, is taking place in a specially built hall in the town of Angers, western […]
There is no dispute that there was fraud. There is no dispute that the accounting was questionable. There is no dispute that shareholders lost billions or that the company went bankrupt. But convicting any top executive, like Bernard J. Ebbers, the former WorldCom chief executive, is difficult. The arcana of accounting, compounded by the difficulty
A federal appeals court refused early Wednesday to order the reinsertion of Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube, denying the latest emergency request by the severely brain-damaged woman’s parents to keep her alive. A panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals said in a 2-1 ruling that the parents “failed to demonstrate a substantial case on
When, last Friday, a lawyer acting for Maurice ‘Hank’ Greenberg, began carting boxes of documents from a branch office of American International Group Inc in Bermuda, he set in motion events that swiftly brought down the legendary chairman of the insurance giant. The next day lawyers acting for AIG found that computer records and tapes
Warren Buffett, the famed American investor, will appear before investigators and regulators on Monday seeking the facts behind a questionable transaction at the heart of a widening inquiry into the insurance business. The suspect transaction was between the world’s largest insurer, American International Group, and General Re, a reinsurance division of Mr Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway.
Medtronic Inc. ended a long-running patent fight on Friday by agreeing to pay $1.35 billion to a Los Angeles doctor who invented much of its spinal-treatment technology. The settlement with Dr. Gary K. Michelson and his company, Karlin Technology Inc., calls for Medtronic to pay $800 million to buy spinal-fusion technology and $550 million to
A leading City law firm has challenged its rivals to donate hundreds of thousands of pounds that they earn as interest on client accounts to cash-strapped legal aid centres. Allen & Overy, one of the “magic circle” of top five firms, is to give voluntary legal agencies all the extra interest retained from clients’ cash
When the founders of King & Wood — now the largest law firm in the People’s Republic of China — chose that name 11 years ago, it wasn’t about ego. “Actually, we do not have a Mr. King and a Mr. Wood,” says Wei Zhang, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based partner in the firm. Instead, the
The Securities Commission and former Tranz Rail chief financial officer Mark Bloomer have settled the landmark insider trading action launched last year by the sharemarket watchdog. Bloomer has not admitted liability, but has agreed to pay $156,000 and, if requested by the commission, make himself available as a witness in the continuing litigation. The Australia-based
A Russian court today declared Mikhail Khodorkovsky guilty of charges including fraud and tax evasion and sentenced the founder of Yukos, the former oil giant, to nine years in prison. The verdict and sentence came in the twelfth day of the laborious verdict-reading process in the most closely watched trial of post-Soviet Russia. Mr Khodorkovsky
