Legal News

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 [...]

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 [...]