Legal News

By Steven Church – May 23, 2013 9:08 AM ET Ally Financial Inc. (ALLY) agreed to pay $2.1 billion to avoid lawsuits by unsecured creditors of the auto-lender’s bankrupt mortgage unit, Residential Capital LLC, according to a court filing today. Creditors who have agreed to settle include noteholder Paulson & Co., MBIA Insurance Corp. and a [...]

By Hans Nichols & Roger Runningen - May 23, 2013 12:01 AM ET “There’s been some legitimate criticisms about how we’re handling this” White House press secretary Jay Carney said yesterday. “We take the path we’ve taken and accept that it’s got some potholes in it. ” Photographer: Official White House Photo by Pete Souza The almost daily disclosures by the [...]

By Phil Mattingly, Annie Linskey & Michael C. Bender - May 23, 2013 12:01 AM ET A Florida man was shot dead in a confrontation with law-enforcement officers who were questioning him about a triple murder two years ago that has been linked to a Boston Marathon bombing suspect, according to two officials familiar with the matter. One of the alleged bombers, Tamerlan [...]

By Elizabeth Amon – May 23, 2013 12:01 AM ET Seyfarth Shaw LLP hired Steven R. Meier for its corporate department in Chicago. Meier joins Seyfarth from Jenner & Block LLP, where he was the co-chairman of the real-estate securities practice and a member of its tax department, the firm said in a statement. Meier’s practice [...]

By Michael Riley - May 23, 2013 12:01 AM ET Several major U.S. utilities are under “constant” cyberattack and haven’t taken precautions to protect critical systems from Iran, North Korea and other adversaries, according to a congressional survey of more than 100 companies accounting for much of the nation’s power system. The survey shows the nation’s electrical grid remains “highly [...]

By Jesse Drucker – May 23, 2013 12:01 AM ET Apple Inc. (AAPL) Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook provided a figure to Congress on Tuesday that U.S. companies rarely disclose: its federal tax bill. Apple paid $6 billion last year — a rate of 30.5 percent. “That’s more than $16 million each day,” Cook said. “We pay all [...]

By Jennifer Oldham & Jim Snyder - May 23, 2013 12:00 AM ET Stan Dempsey, an oil and gas lobbyist, raced from one committee hearing to another in Colorado’s statehouse this spring, defending the industry against an onslaught of bills. While only one of 10 measures passed, the flurry of activity is one of several worrying signs to Dempsey and others in [...]

By Asjylyn Loder, Stephanie Bodoni & Rupert Rowling – May 22, 2013 10:55 PM ET A customer fills an automobile at the fuel pump of a gas station, operated by Statoil Fuel & Retail ASA, in Malmo, Sweden. Photographer: Linus Hook/Bloomberg Statoil ASA (STL) sold a tanker of Norwegian crude valued at about $63 million to BP Plc [...]

By David Voreacos - May 22, 2013 11:06 AM ET A New Jersey businessman avoided prison after admitting he conspired with five HSBC Holdings Plc (HSBA) bankers to hide his Indian bank accounts from U.S. tax authorities, getting credit for helping prosecutors. Vaibhav Dahake was sentenced to one year of probation today in federal court in Trenton, New Jersey, where [...]

By Phil Mattingly – May 22, 2013 10:40 AM ET A man was shot dead in Orlando, Florida, while being questioned by the FBI in connection with the Boston Marathon bombings. Law-enforcement officials were interviewing the man this morning when a violent confrontation ended with a shooting involving a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent, said Paul Bresson, a spokesman [...]

By Jesse Drucker - May 22, 2013 12:15 AM ET U.S. Senate scrutiny of Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s tax strategies turned the spotlight on a unit with $30 billion in profit since 2009 that’s incorporated in Ireland, controlled by a board in California, and doesn’t pay taxes in either place. Apple officials acknowledged yesterday at a congressional hearing that the [...]

By Susan Decker - May 22, 2013 12:01 AM ET Nintendo Co. (7974), the world’s biggest video-game maker, won a second U.S. patent-infringement case this month, successfully defending its Wii system and adding to a trend of companies fighting royalty demands and winning. Nintendo didn’t infringe Copper Innovations Group LLC’s patent for a method of interaction between a [...]

By Andrew Harris - May 22, 2013 12:00 AM ET The U.S. law requiring employers to provide health insurance coverage for birth control is set to come before an appeals court in cases brought by two businesses whose owners say they operate according to Catholic doctrine. The businesses, a construction firm from southwestern Illinois and an auto-parts maker in southeastern Indiana, [...]

By Niklas Magnusson & Katarina Gustafsson - May 21, 2013 6:30 AM ET Three former Saab Automobile executives, including former Chief Executive Officer Jan-Aake Jonsson and Chief Financial Officer Karl-Gustav Lindstroem, were arrested by Swedish prosecutors in an accounting-fraud probe. Three people were questioned yesterday on suspicion of “grave attempts to complicate tax controls” during 2010 and 2011, Olof Sahlgren, [...]

By Jake Rudnitsky, Jesse Riseborough & Grant Smith – May 21, 2013 5:53 AM ET The investigation into possible oil-price fixing gathered pace as trading houses from Glencore Xstrata Plc, the $70 billion mining firm, to Gunvor Group Ltd. were asked to provide information to European regulators. Glencore Xstrata, Gunvor and Vitol Group, which aren’t [...]

By Todd Shields & Adam Satariano - May 21, 2013 1:39 AM ET Apple Inc. (AAPL) Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook is going somewhere his predecessor never ventured: the witness table at a congressional hearing on Capitol Hill. Cook will be questioned today by U.S. senators during a hearing on the company’s untaxed overseas billions. His congressional debut, following an appearance at PresidentBarack Obama’s State [...]

By Bob Van Voris - May 21, 2013 12:01 AM ET A federal judge told a lawyer for New York City she was troubled by the number of stops police made that failed to result in arrests, summonses or seizure of illegal weapons. U.S. District Judge Shira Scheindlin in Manhattan yesterday asked the lawyer about data showing that 90 percent of people [...]

By Patricia Hurtado - May 21, 2013 12:01 AM ET Former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (GS) director Rajat Gupta is set to ask a federal appeals court in New York today to overturn his insider-trading conviction by arguing the U.S. shouldn’t have been allowed to use evidence from wiretapped phone calls that didn’t involve him. Gupta has already been handed one victory from the [...]

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 [...]