Posts Tagged ‘enforcement’
Carnival Dinged $20M on Compliance
Here’s a tale of corporate misconduct on the high seas that compliance officers will want to see: Carnival Corp. has agreed to pay a $20 million fine and hire a chief compliance officer for violating a corporate probation agreement over environmental pollution. The headline is that Carnival had agreed in 2017 to a court-appointed compliance…
Read MoreNext: New False Claims Act Guidance
Another day, another piece of guidance from the Justice Department about corporate compliance programs — this time, explaining how companies might win cooperation credit when facing violations of the False Claims Act. The Civil Division of the Justice Department posted the guidance Tuesday afternoon. The the material hews closely to what the Criminal Division has…
Read MoreBankrate Pays $28.5M in Fraud Case
Yes, yes, the compliance community is buzzing today about the $850 million FCPA settlement announced Wednesday evening between U.S. authorities and Russian mobile phone company MTS. We’ll get to MTS another day. The Justice Department also settled a securities and accounting fraud case yesterday with the owners of personal finance website Bankrate.com, and that one…
Read More$2 Mill Fine for Weak Compliance
FINRA today hit broker-dealer firm Cantor Fitzgerald with a $2 million fine for sloppy compliance practices that lasted at least five years, in an enforcement action sure to warm a compliance officer’s heart. The offenses related to naked short selling, where an investor first borrows stock to sell at a high price, then buys it…
Read MoreMore DOJ! New Cooperation Policy
More news from the Justice Department on corporations cooperating with criminal investigations: from now on, prosecutors will only insist that companies identify individuals “substantially” involved with the misconduct in question, rather than everyone involved. So says deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, who announced the new policy on Thursday at the annual FCPA Conference happening in…
Read MoreDispatches From Securities Enforcement Forum
Scads of securities lawyers gathered in Washington on Thursday for the annual Securities Enforcement Forum, a one-day confab on all things related to enforcement actions against publicly traded companies — insider trading, FCPA, cybersecurity, whistleblower retaliation, and much more. The event is run by SecuritiesDocket.com, which follows securities enforcement just as obsessively as we follow…
Read MoreCorporate Plea Bargains Under Fire Again
Any time a federal judge begins a ruling with the words, “Let’s see if I’ve got this straight,” you know you’re in for something special. Last week, district court judge William Young did not disappoint. With that opening sentence, Young, a veteran and respected judge in Boston, delivered a 24-page broadside against the Justice Department’s…
Read MoreAnother Great Example of Poor Compliance Culture
I just love the casino business. Every thinker and observer of corporate compliance issues should. Really, where else can you find such a perfect blend of internal control and corporate culture concerns, plus all those whacky casino names? The enforcement examples you find here always straddle hard-edged financial controls and business practices that make you…
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