Legal News

By Kit Chellel – Feb 2, 2012 10:50 AM ET MF Global Holding Ltd.’s (MF) U.K. administrators plan to make the first payment to British clients of the failed brokerage, returning 26 cents on the dollar. KPMG LLP, the administrators of MF Global’s U.K. unit, said the figure was the most it could return at [...]

By Chris Dolmetsch – Feb 2, 2012 10:08 AM ET Macy’s Inc. (M) asked a New York state Supreme Court justice to issue a preliminary injunction against Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc. in a filing yesterday in Manhattan. The retailer sued in New York state Supreme Court on Jan. 23 seeking to stop New York-based Martha Stewart Living [...]

By David McLaughlin – Feb 2, 2012 12:01 AM ET The deadline for states to decide whether to join a proposed nationwide foreclosure settlement with banks was delayed to Feb. 6 from Feb. 3, the Iowa Attorney General’s Office said. States were given more time to evaluate the proposal, which may total $25 billion, after [...]

By Patricia Hurtado – Feb 1, 2012 10:54 AM ET Former Credit Suisse Group AG (CSGN) employee David Higgs pleaded guilty to conspiracy related to the intentional mismarking of prices tied to securities including collateralized debt obligations. Another former bank employee, Salmaan Siddiqui, will plead guilty later today, a person familiar with the case said. Switzerland’s [...]

By Dawn McCarty and Sophia Pearson – Feb 1, 2012 10:00 AM ET United Retail Group Inc (URGI)., owner of the Avenue plus-size women’s clothing stores, filed for bankruptcy court protection citing leasing costs and announced plans to sell the company. An affiliate of Versa Capital Management, a Philadelphia- based private-equity firm, agreed to serve as the lead, [...]

By Nandini Sukumar – Feb 1, 2012 8:47 AM ET NYSE Euronext (NYX) Chief Executive Officer Duncan Niederauer said the exchange operator is considering whether to appeal against European regulators’ veto of its merger with Deutsche Boerse AG. (DB1) An “appeal is an option going forward,” Niederauer said in a phone interview today, while he’s in “no [...]

By Kit Chellel and Erik Larson – Feb 1, 2012 5:56 AM ET Glenn Mulcaire, the ex-private investigator who hacked into celebrities’ voice mails for News Corp. (NWSA)’s News of the World, lost a U.K. appeal to avoid giving “incriminating” evidence in civil lawsuits against him. The ruling today by the Court of Appeal in London [...]

By Aoife White – Jan 31, 2012 9:34 AM ET Samsung Electronics Co. (005930) is being probed by European Union antitrust regulators over licensing of patents to other mobile-phone manufacturers. The European Commission said it will investigate whether Samsung broke a 1998 commitment to license any standard essential patents for phones on “fair, reasonable and non- [...]

By Tom Schoenberg and Phil Milford – Jan 31, 2012 9:27 AM ET The U.S. asked a judge to reject a challenge to the Obama administration’s appointments to the National Labor Relations Board while the Senate was out of town, calling the effort “futile.” Trade groups, including the National Association of Manufacturers, the National Right to [...]

By Michael A. Riley and Sophia Pearson – Jan 31, 2012 12:00 AM ET China-based hackers looking to derail the $40 billion acquisition of the world’s largest potash producer by an Australian mining giant zeroed in on offices on Toronto’s Bay Street, home of the Canadian law firms handling the deal. Over a few months [...]

By Debra Mao – Jan 30, 2012 5:00 PM ET Hong Kong’s securities watchdog is fighting to defend the way it tackles offshore targets after losing the first round of its insider trading case against hedge fund firm Tiger Asia Management LLC. The Securities and Futures Commission will try next week to overturn a court ruling [...]

By Lindsay Fortado and Ben Moshinsky – Jan 30, 2012 11:59 AM ET Kweku Adoboli, the former UBS AG trader who is accused of causing the largest loss from unauthorized trading in British history, pleaded not guilty to fraud and false accounting. Adoboli, dressed in a grey suit and blue tie, pleaded not guilty to all [...]

By Manuel Baigorri, Steve Rothwell and Alex Webb – Jan 30, 2012 10:23 AM ET Spanair SA’s collapse after the withdrawal of state funding suggests Europe’s debt crisis may spur airlines from the Mediterranean to the Baltic to consider mergers or risk failure. The first collapse of a scheduled European airline since the last recession [...]

By Phil Milford – Jan 30, 2012 9:10 AM ET The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. sued former officials of County Bank in Merced, California, part of Capital Corp. of the West, claiming their mismanagement caused $42 million in losses through bad loans. Named in the suit, filed Jan. 27 in federal court in Fresno, were former [...]

By Joel Rosenblatt – Jan 30, 2012 12:00 AM ET California Attorney General Kamala Harris’s holdout position in a proposed agreement with banks over foreclosure practices may reap financial and political rewards at the cost of prolonging some constituents’ suffering. Her strategy has created an obstacle in the negotiations between state attorneys general and the [...]

By Patricia Hurtado and Dune Lawrence – Jan 27, 2012 10:14 AM ET The FBI said it searched the Manhattan offices of reverse merger advisory firm New York Global Group (NYGGRPZ), which specializes in helping companies from China go public in the U.S. New York Global describes itself as a private-equity and corporate advisory firm also with [...]

By Thom Weidlich – Jan 27, 2012 9:39 AM ET Billionaire Len Blavatnik, who is suing JPMorgan Chase & Co. claiming it lost 10 percent of the $1 billion it managed for him, refused to extend the fact- gathering period as requested by one of the bank’s lawyers, who is about to have open-heart surgery, according [...]

By Aoife White – Jan 27, 2012 9:26 AM ET Air France-KLM Group (AF), Delta Air Lines Inc. (DAL) and Alitalia SpA are under investigation by European Union antitrust regulators over concerns their pact to coordinate trans-Atlantic flights may hurt competition. The cooperation may remove rivalry on several routes where they used to compete, the European [...]

By Ben Moshinsky – Jan 27, 2012 8:33 AM ET Employees at Greenlight Capital Inc. (GRLE) and JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM)’s Cazenove unit were fined in a second wave of U.K. sanctions over Greenlight’s sale of Punch Taverns Plc (PUB) shares in 2009. Alexander Ten-Holter, the hedge fund’s former compliance officer, was fined 130,000 pounds ($204,000) for [...]

By Kit Chellel – Jan 26, 2012 5:22 AM ET MF Global (MFGLQ) Holding Ltd.’s clients may be the losers no matter who wins a $700 million dispute between bankruptcy administrators in London and New York that threatens the return of money locked in customer accounts. The trustee of MF Global Inc., the New York brokerage [...]