Legal News

By Cullen Wheatley and Taejin Park – Nov 27, 2011 11:13 PM ET Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton LLP, Samsung Life Insurance Co.’s adviser on South Korea’s biggest initial public offering, plans an office in Seoul now that a free trade deal is allowing foreign law firms in. Yong Guk Lee, who will move from [...]

By Jef Feeley and David Voreacos – Nov 23, 2011 9:44 AM ET Merck & Co. (MRK), the second-largest U.S. drugmaker, will pay $950 million and a unit of the company will plead guilty to a criminal misdemeanor charge to resolve a U.S. probe of its illegal marketing of the painkiller Vioxx. Merck Sharp & [...]

By Bob Van Voris – Nov 23, 2011 12:00 AM ET Citigroup Inc. (C), whose $285 million settlement with U.S. regulators over a collapsed collateralized debt obligation was faulted by a federal judge as too lenient, may have to pay more money to avoid admitting it did anything wrong, said lawyers following the case. Citigroup, [...]

By Steven Church and Romy Varghese – Nov 23, 2011 12:00 AM ET Pennsylvania will pursue a plan to put Harrisburg, its bankrupt capital, into state receivership even if a U.S. judge allows the city to seek bankruptcy protection in federal court. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Mary D. France will hear arguments today about whether the [...]

By Tiffany Kary – Nov 23, 2011 12:00 AM ET MF Global Inc. brokerage customers, who may be missing more than $1.2 billion from their accounts, won’t be allowed to form a committee to represent their interests in bankruptcy court, a judge ruled. Customer accounts believed to hold $5.45 billion were frozen Oct. 31, the [...]

By Lindsay Fortado, Ben Moshinsky and Kit Chellel – Nov 22, 2011 6:59 AM ET Kweku Adoboli, a former UBS AG (UBSN) trader, was given a four-week delay to enter a plea to charges he caused the largest unauthorized trading loss in U.K. history. Adoboli was remanded into custody at a hearing in London today until another [...]

By David Glovin and John Helyar – Nov 22, 2011 4:04 AM ET Axes America LLC, the now-defunct brokerage firm that advised Olympus Corp. in a transaction being investigated by the FBI, ceased operations in March 2008 soon after U.S. regulators began examining its books, records show. Beginning in 2006, New York-based Axes America served as [...]

By Steven Church – Nov 22, 2011 12:00 AM ET Jefferson County, Alabama’s sewer debt needs to be cut by about $1 billion and the state must back repayment of the remaining bonds to keep sewer rates affordable, the receiver running the sewer system said in court today. John S. Young Jr. was responding to questions [...]

By Ben Moshinsky – Nov 21, 2011 7:00 PM ET U.K. banks face a day of disaster today, as part of a simulation led by the Financial Services Authority to test firms’ responses to a cyber-attack on payment systems and travel chaos during the London 2012 Olympic Games. The FSA was to contact 87 firms, beginning [...]

By Jef Feeley and Margaret Cronin Fisk – Nov 21, 2011 8:03 AM ET Units of Bayer AG (BAYN), Germany’s largest drugmaker, may have sought to market the Yasmin family of birth- control pills for unapproved uses and misled women about the health risks the drug posed, according to company e-mails. Bayer unit officials discussed promoting the contraceptive [...]

By Ben Sills – Nov 21, 2011 7:57 AM ET Thirty-six years after his death, Spanish Dictator General Francisco Franco managed to make his presence felt in Spain’s general elections yesterday. Socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero called the vote on the anniversary of the Generalissimo’s death. Nov. 20 is a day celebrated each year by [...]

By Elizabeth Campbell – Nov 21, 2011 6:53 AM ET Hedge funds cut bullish commodity bets by the most in seven weeks on mounting concern that Europe’s debt crisis will restrain global economic growth and demand for raw materials. Money managers reduced combined net-long positions across 18 U.S. futures and options by 10 percent to [...]

By Catarina Saraiva – Nov 21, 2011 6:04 AM ET Foreign bank deposits at the Federal Reserve have more than doubled to $715 billion from $350 billion since the end of 2010 amid Europe’s debt turmoil, buttressing the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency. Forty-seven non-U.S. banks held balances of more than $1 billion at [...]

By David Voreacos and Susannah Nesmith – Nov 18, 2011 10:35 AM ET Former UBS AG (UBS) banker Renzo Gadola, who aided Americans in cheating U.S. tax authorities before helping prosecutors snare other bankers, avoided prison when a judge sentenced him to five years of probation. U.S. District Judge James Lawrence King rewarded Gadola today in [...]

By Eric Engleman – Nov 18, 2011 3:56 AM ET Chinese phone-equipment makers Huawei Technologies Co. and ZTE Corp. (000063) are the focus of a U.S. House intelligence committee investigation into whether the companies’ expansion in the U.S. poses a security threat. The probe will focus on whether the companies’ presence provides “the Chinese government an [...]

By Tom Schoenberg and Seth Stern – Nov 18, 2011 12:01 AM ET An Idaho man suspected of firing a semi-automatic rifle at the White House was charged with trying to kill President Barack Obama. The suspect, Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez of Idaho Falls, drove to Washington with an assault rifle and other weapons after telling people in [...]

By Lindsay Fortado and Patricia Hurtado – Nov 17, 2011 11:39 PM ET Former Olympus Corp. (7733) President Michael C. Woodford was asked to return for a second interview by U.S. investigators — this time including the Securities and Exchange Commission — in a federal probe of hundreds of millions of dollars in advisory fees paid [...]

By Phil Milford and Tiffany Kary – Nov 17, 2011 10:29 AM ET General Maritime Corp. (GMR), the second- largest U.S. owner of oil tankers, filed for bankruptcy protection from creditors after falling oil demand and a surplus of ships led to two years of losses. The New York-based company listed assets of $1.71 billion and [...]

By Patricia Hurtado – Nov 17, 2011 7:45 AM ET U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald in Chicago issued subpoenas in a probe of MF Global Holdings Ltd., the broker-dealer parent that filed for bankruptcy Oct. 31, a person familiar with the matter said. MF Global, which was run by former New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine, sought Chapter 11 [...]

By Edvard Pettersson – Nov 17, 2011 12:01 AM ET A former trader at convicted con man’s Bernard Madoff’s investment firm, David Kugel, agreed to plead guilty to fraud, prosecutors said. Kugel is expected to enter a guilty plea “pursuant to a cooperation agreement with the government” at a Nov. 21 hearing, prosecutors said yesterday in [...]