Legal News

By Douglas MacMillan – May 20, 2013 8:42 AM ET Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO) is buying blogging network Tumblr Inc. for about $1.1 billion as Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer seeks to lure users and advertisers with her priciest acquisition to date. Tumblr, headquartered in New York, will continue to host its more than 108 million blogs, while CEO [...]

By Theophilos Argitis & Doug Alexander - May 20, 2013 12:01 AM ET Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper will seek to limit the damage from the first scandal to touch his inner circle. Nigel Wright, Harper’s chief of staff, resigned yesterday amid an ethics probe into a C$90,000 ($87,500) payment he made to Conservative Senator Mike Duffy to cover the repayment of [...]

By Jeanne Cummings & Lisa Lerer – May 20, 2013 12:01 AM ET President Barack Obama is facing a make-or-break week as he tries to seize control of three scandal story lines that could upend one of the top priorities of his second term: revising the nation’s immigration laws. Obama won’t cooperate in a “partisan fishing expedition” [...]

By Ben Moshinsky, Lynn Doan & Jim Brunsden - May 19, 2013 8:01 PM ET Enron Corp.’s 2001 collapse revealed the extent of its manipulation of spot gas prices. Twelve years later, European Union regulators may discover energy traders never learned the lessons of the scandal. BP Plc (BP/), Royal Dutch Shell Plc (RDSA) and Platts were visited by EU inspectors last week [...]

By Jennifer Ryan - May 19, 2013 7:00 PM ET George Town, Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands. Photographer: David Rogers/Getty Images Prime Minister David Cameron wrote to the Cayman Islands and nine other U.K. territories to request action to tackle company tax evasion as Britain prepares to host the Group of Eight summit next month. “We need to know who really owns and controls each and [...]

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 [...]