The attorney for two former altar boys who claim a Roman Catholic priest molested them in Antioch asked a jury Tuesday to impose $27 million in damages, a figure one church attorney said was unwarranted and “pulled out of the air.” The Rev. Robert Ponciroli victimized Tom Thatcher, 33, and his brother Bob, 34, two […]

State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has received thousands of dollars in campaign donations from lawyers at a prominent Manhattan law firm hired by AIG — even as the insurance giant is under investigation by Spitzer’s office. Between late November and mid-January, Spitzer received $18,500 from 16 different attorneys from the law firm of Paul, Weiss,

Microsoft Corporation said yesterday that it would pay Gateway $150 million over four years to settle the computer maker’s claim that it was harmed by Microsoft’s abuse of its Windows monopoly. Microsoft, which is based in Redmond, Wash., said it would take a $123 million pretax charge in the quarter ended March 31 to account

A federal judge Monday rejected Martha Stewart’s bid to end her five months of house arrest early, calling her sentence “reasonable and appropriate.” Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum said she was not persuaded by Stewart’s claim that the punishment was hurting her business. “I see no reason to modify the sentence,” the judge said. Stewart began

The fight over a secretive entity that wields enormous influence over AIG is just starting There’s probably never been anything like this in U.S. corporate history: a titanic legal struggle pitting the interests of corporate governance and public shareholders against those of a private company and the rights of its owners. At the pinnacle of

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.

The case, which is expected to last until Christmas, is likely to have a significant impact on the accountancy profession, the role of non-executive directors and Equitable’s policyholders. Vanni Treves, chairman of Equitable Life, is understood to have made an attempt to get the troubled life insurer’s former auditors to enter into talks about settling

Italy’s top three firms last year retained their positions as the Continent’s most profitable of the 100 largest firms, with top partners at Bonelli Erede Papalardo earning a staggering £5m. Despite a slow year and a scarcity of big-ticket M&A, Bonelli secured the top spot in the profit table, with average profit per equity partner

New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer has issued subpoenas to at least two of the nation’s three largest drug distributors in what appears to be a probe into the way the companies buy drugs from each other. AmerisourceBergen Corp., Chesterbrook, Pa., in a filing late Thursday with the Securities and Exchange Commission said one of

A former security guard at Michael Jackson’s Neverland ranch told a lurid and graphic story Thursday about seeing the singer sexually abusing a child in the early 1990s, but was attacked by Jackson’s lawyer as making the whole thing up “to get even.” Ralph Chacon was called to the stand in Jackson’s child molestation trial