Legal News

By Karin Matussek - May 17, 2013 8:20 AM ET Ex-Porsche SE Chief Financial Officer Holger Haerter’s lawyer attacked claims that a March 2009 e-mail to BNP Paribas SA (BNP)’s central credit committee may have influenced the bank’s decision to back part of a 10 billion-euro ($12.9 billion) loan. The bank had already decided to provide Porsche the 500 [...]

By Jeremy Hodges & Jesse Westbrook – May 17, 2013 7:24 AM ET Elena Ambrosiadou, co-founder of Ikos Asset Management Ltd., won a U.K. court case brought by her estranged husband Martin Coward over who owns the computer software that runs the hedge fund’s trading platform. While Coward wrote the original software, he did so [...]

By David Glovin & Patricia Hurtado - May 17, 2013 7:14 AM ET Danielle Chiesi, the 47-year-old femme fatale analyst who pleaded guilty to securities fraud in the biggest U.S. insider-trading crackdown, is back in town. Chiesi, who did a 15-month stint at a West Virginia prison camp for passing illegal stock tips to hedge-fund manager Raj Rajaratnam, returned in January to New York City and has been living [...]

By Edward Klump, Asjylyn Loder & Lynn Doan - May 17, 2013 5:44 AM ET The European oil price-fixing probe expanded as Neste Oil Oyj (NES1V), Finland’s only refiner, said it was asked to provide information regarding potential manipulation of global crude and biofuel markets. The widening investigation comes as Pannonia Ethanol, a Hungarian biofuel producer, said it lodged a complaint with the [...]

By Edvard Pettersson – May 17, 2013 12:01 AM ET An Uzbek national living in Boise,Idaho, faces U.S. charges that he conspired to support a terrorist organization, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, and taught others how to make bombs. Fazliddin Kurbanov, 30, was arrested yesterday on federal charges filed in Boise and in Salt Lake [...]

By Jeremy Hodges - May 16, 2013 5:09 AM ET Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS)’s deal with the U.K. government that may have saved the investment bank as much as 20 million pounds ($30.6 million) on its taxes didn’t break any laws, a judge ruled. Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs’s decision to reduce the New York-based bank’s tax [...]

By Danielle Ivory - May 16, 2013 12:01 AM ET Women led eight of Washington’s 50 most politically active trade lobby groups and earned about $600,000 less than their male counterparts, according to salary data compiled by Bloomberg. The female chief executive officers were paid an average of $1.31 million in 2011, compared with $1.93 million paid to the [...]

By Edvard Pettersson & Andrew Harris - May 16, 2013 12:01 AM ET Two Arkansas abortion providers in Little Rock won a judge’s approval to proceed with a challenge to the constitutionality of a state law making it illegal with some exceptions to abort a pregnancy after 12 weeks. U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright in Little Rock in a ruling yesterday [...]

By Andrew Harris & Dan Margolies - May 16, 2013 12:01 AM ET Dow Chemical Co. (DOW) was ordered by a federal judge to pay a $1.2 billion judgment in a urethane price-fixing case after losing its bid to undo a jury’s verdict that it colluded with competitors. U.S. District Judge John W. Lungstrum in Kansas City, Kansas, yesterday rejected Dow [...]

By Elizabeth Amon – May 16, 2013 12:01 AM ET Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP hired John Rhie as chairman of the firm’s Asian international arbitration practice and to open a Hong Kong office. Rhie, who will become managing partner of the office when it opens after receiving approval, was recently with Korean firm Kim [...]

By Tom Schoenberg – May 16, 2013 12:00 AM ET Danny Carter shocked colleagues when the Hampton, Virginia, jailer posted a picture of his boss’s opponent in the sheriff’s race on his Facebook page along with a link to the contender’s website. The post, made almost four years ago because Carter clicked the “Like” button on [...]

By Roxana Tiron – May 16, 2013 12:00 AM ET A bipartisan group of eight U.S. House members is at an impasse after negotiating on an immigration bill for the past four years, said one member of the group, Idaho Republican Raul Labrador. A meeting planned for today may mark the last time the group [...]

By Brian Swint, Lananh Nguyen & Joe Carroll - May 15, 2013 11:07 AM ET The probe, which extends to undisclosed crude-derived products and biofuels, underscores how pricing in some energy markets lacks the transparency of financial products such as stocks and U.S. corporate bonds. Three of Europe’s biggest oil explorers are among companies being questioned by European antitrust regulators about potential [...]

By Richard Rubin – May 15, 2013 10:59 AM ET The widening inquiries into the Internal Revenue Service are focusing less on why employees singled out small-government groups for scrutiny and more on agency executives who didn’t inform Congress earlier. While an inspector general’s report released yesterday blamed “ineffective management” at the IRS for inappropriate [...]

By Don Jeffrey – May 15, 2013 10:27 AM ET Aereo Inc., the Barry Diller-backed online TV service, asked a federal judge to dismiss copyright infringement claims by the broadcast TV networks, which failed to persuade an appeals court to shut down its operation. Aereo yesterday requested judgment without a trial from U.S. District Judge [...]

By Patricia Hurtado – May 15, 2013 10:24 AM ET Apple Inc. engaged in a horizontal price-fixing scheme with some of the U.S.’s largest publishers to violate antitrust laws by working “to strip retailers of pricing authority,” the U.S. Justice Department said in a court filing. The department’s Antitrust Division filed papers for a trial [...]

By Erik Larson, Greg Farrell & Janelle Lawrence - May 15, 2013 12:00 AM ET A Harvard Medical School research assistant who went on to serve as a U.S. judge for 23 years now finds herself at the center of the Boston Marathon bombing case, and by extension the post 9-11 issue of whether, and when, suspected terrorists should benefit from [...]

By Richard Rubin - May 14, 2013 8:59 AM ET What is known so far about the Internal Revenue Service’s examination of political nonprofit groups doesn’t answer one main question — whether the U.S. tax agency’s actions were malicious or just inept. IRS employees, trying to figure out how to sort through a surge in applications for nonprofit status, [...]

By Karin Matussek - May 14, 2013 7:32 AM ET Google Inc. (GOOG), operator of the world’s largest Internet search engine, lost a case inGermany’s top civil court over how its autocomplete function adds words to searches. If alerted about libelous words that are added to a name entered in the search slot, Google has to block them, [...]

By Lindsay Fortado, Ben Moshinsky & Alexis Leondis - May 14, 2013 5:24 AM ET Former BlackRock Inc. (BLK) fund manager Mark Lyttleton was arrested April 30 as part of aninsider trading probe by the U.K. Financial Conduct Authority, two people familiar with the matter said. Lyttleton was detained along with an unidentified woman in west London, said one of the people, both of whom [...]