Archive for August, 2006
August 27th, 2006
Briton facing extradition to US on corporate fraud charges (AFP via Yahoo! News)
Thu Aug 24, 1:04 PM ET
LONDON (AFP) - A British businessman who tried to surrender voluntarily to face fraud charges in the United States must instead await formal extradition and travel under arrest, his lawyer said.
Jeremy Crook, 53, former European vice-president of software firm Peregrine Systems, had preferred to fly to the United States on his own accord to face the allegations, which he denies. He even went so far as to book a flight for next Tuesday and was understood to be in negotiations with the US Department of Justice about potential bail conditions.
But when he went to City of Westminster magistrates court on Wednesday to request his passport back, he was refused — and told he must face full extradition proceedings. If he does not appeal the ruling, or if he loses an appeal, he will be arrested and accompanied by US marshalls onto a flight to the United States in a scene repeating the extradition of three NatWest bankers implicated in an Enron-related fraud case in Texas.
August 22nd, 2006
Corporate governance (FT.com via Yahoo! News)
Kim Thomas Mon Aug 21, 6:25 AM ET
The July extradition of three British bankers to the US shows that the repercussions of the Enron scandal - in which company executives were able to conceal billions of dollars of debt from shareholders - are still being felt.
The most lasting impact of Enron, and other corporate failures such as Italy’s Parmalat, has been felt via the US’s Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which requires companies listed on the US stock exchange to establish and manage an adequate internal control structure and procedures for financial reporting, and to obtain annual reports from its auditors about the effectiveness of those procedures.
Businesses in the EU, too, are facing numerous new regulatory requirements. The financial sector has been affected in particular by regulations such as Basel II, the first phase of which comes into force at the end of this year, and the Market in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID), a wide-ranging directive that comes into force in 2007, and imposes requirements governing the organisation and conduct of business of investment firms.
August 14th, 2006
Buttoning up white-collar cases (The Philadelphia Inquirer)
When Jack Dodds left the U.S. Attorney’s Office for a big Philadelphia law firm in 1993, he joined two other former prosecutors here and one in Washington in a nascent white-collar defense unit.
Today, there are about 50 lawyers in that unit in offices across the nation and in Paris, and they are busy - helping companies and executives enmeshed in investigations of everything from accounting fraud and health-care violations to price-fixing and insider trading.
But Morgan, Lewis & Bockius L.L.P. is not the only firm enjoying a burst in business in this specialized area of criminal defense: A new era of increased law-enforcement scrutiny of white-collar crime has triggered a boom across the country for defense lawyers who know what to do when FBI agents walk into a business with a grand-jury subpoena.
August 9th, 2006
Scotland’s corporate fraud figures reach record £47m (Edinburgh Evening News)
SERIOUS corporate fraud in Scotland hit a record £47 million over the first-half of 2006 - more than double the £18m rip-off seen over the whole of 2005, KPMG’s latest Forensic Fraud Barometer showed today.
