How did an erudite 60-year-old London lawyer married to a member of the British Cabinet get embroiled in the Italian Prime Minister’s tax trial? The prosecution alleges that Silvio Berlusconi used a complex network of offshore companies to boost artificially the price of film rights to reduce the business’s tax liabilities. By the time David […]

Jury selection for former Bank of America broker Theodore Sihpol III is set to begin today in Manhattan Supreme Court. In a 40-count indictment, Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, as part of his office’s ongoing efforts to curb alleged abuses in the mutual fund industry, charged Sihpol for late-trading by helping hedge fund Canary Capital Partners

Michael Jackson’s legal team is undergoing a shakeup just days before the defense is expected to start presenting its case to jurors in the pop star’s trial on child molestation charges. Brian Oxman is no longer representing Jackson, according to a notice filed Monday in Santa Barbara County Superior Court. The document did not give

Arthur Andersen, the once-venerable accounting firm indicted, convicted and destroyed after the collapse of Enron, has reached an agreement to pay $65 million to resolve a class-action lawsuit filed against it by investors in WorldCom in the wake of an $11 billion accounting scandal. The terms of the settlement, which requires court approval, are to

It began with an e-mail that any in-house counsel could have written: a reminder to colleagues about the company’s document retention policy. “It will be helpful to make sure that we have complied with the policy,” wrote Nancy Temple, a Chicago-based in-house lawyer for the Arthur Andersen accounting firm, in October 2001. The policy called

A federal grand jury is investigating whether Thomas M. Coughlin, a former vice president of Wal-Mart Stores, cheated on an expense account and misused gift cards, a Wal-Mart spokesman said yesterday. Wal-Mart told regulators in a filing that Mr. Coughlin may have improperly appropriated as much as $500,000. Lawyers for Mr. Coughlin have denied the

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 judge refused to bring an early end to the corporate fraud trial of Richard Scrushy on Thursday, rejecting defense requests to throw out key charges that the fired HealthSouth Corp. chief directed a huge accounting scheme. The decision by U.S. District Judge Karon Bowdre — who did dismiss one of three other counts accusing

A federal appeals court on Wednesday refused to reconsider a ruling barring the government from seeking $280 billion in past profits from cigarette makers as part of its civil racketeering case against the industry. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit dealt another setback to the government’s case by rejecting a request that

Enron Corp.’s once-proud broadband unit was little more than a mishmash of questionable software, accounting tricks and unkept promises, a U.S. prosecutor said as the trial of five former executives got under way on Tuesday. “The mission of Enron Broadband Services (EBS) was to pump up the Enron stock price by telling investors they had