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Fraud

Revoke ExxonMobil’s Corporate Charter

January 14, 2016 Marjorie Cohn, www.truth-out.org , , ,
By Marjorie Cohn for Truthout - More than 50,000 people from around the world came together in Paris in December 2015 to address the single biggest threat to the survival of the natural world - the climate crisis. There is virtual unanimity among scientists that the burning of fossil fuels is causing the warming of the planet, and if critical steps are not taken, a habitable world will cease to exist. But there are entities that stand to lose if alternative sources of energy overtake coal, oil and natural gas. They are huge corporations, including ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and Texaco.

Bank Crimes Pay: Under The Thumb Of Global Financial Mafiocracy

December 1, 2015 Andrew Gavin Marshall, www.occupy.com , ,
By Andrew Gavin Marshall for Occupy - On Nov. 13, the United Kingdom’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) announced it was charging 10 individual bankers, working for two separate banks, Deutsche Bank and Barclays, with fraud over their rigging of the Euribor rates. The latest announcement shines the spotlight once again on the scandals and criminal behavior that have come to define the world of global banking. To date, only a handful of the world’s largest banks have been repeatedly investigated, charged, fined or settled in relation to a succession of large financial scams, starting with mortgage fraud and the Libor scandal in 2012, the Euribor scandal and the Forex (foreign exchange) rate rigging.

HSBC Accused Of Fraud, Money Laundering, Forming Criminal Org

November 26, 2014 Raf Casert, www.huffingtonpost.ca , , ,
A Belgian investigating judge has charged a Swiss private banking branch of HSBC with massive organized fiscal fraud, money laundering and forming a criminal organization to the benefit of over 1,000 wealthy clients that cost the Belgian authorities "hundreds of millions of euros." The prosecutor's office said Monday the accusations against HSBC Private Bank NV/SA are based on its involvement over the years with "wealthy clients, specifically from the Antwerp diamond industry." It said the justice ministry is also looking into possible money laundering. In August, HSBC Holdings PLC said it knew inquiries were ongoing and that the penalties "could be significant." On Monday, it said it had been notified of the formal investigation by the Belgian judge.

States Ditch Electronic Voting Machines

November 5, 2014 Cory Bennett, www.thehill.com , , ,
States have abandoned electronic voting machines in droves, ensuring that most voters will be casting their ballots by hand on Election Day. With many electronic voting machines more than a decade old, and states lacking the funding to repair or replace them, officials have opted to return to the pencil-and-paper voting that the new technology was supposed to replace. Nearly 70 percent of voters will be casting ballots by hand on Tuesday, according to Pamela Smith, president of election watchdog Verified Voting. "Paper, even though it sounds kind of old school, it actually has properties that serve the elections really well," Smith said. It’s an outcome few would have predicted after the 2000 election, when the battle over “hanging chads” in the Florida recount spurred a massive, $3 billion federal investment in electronic voting machines.

Computerized Voting, Unseen Threat To Democracy

November 5, 2014 Victoria Collier, www.truth-out.org , , ,
Our article in Truthout last week, Top Ten Epic Reasons Why You Should Give a Sh*t About Voting, elicited quite a few comments from readers voicing concern that ballots may not be correctly or honestly counted by our "black box" computer voting systems - and we would never know. The Internet is already roaring with stories of visible attacks on democracy so far in the 2014 elections: 40,000 mostly minority voters purged from Georgia's voter roles and thousands more in 26 other states, up to 600,000 Texas voters disenfranchised due to new Voter ID laws, and the attempts to override the electoral college in gerrymandered blue states like Michigan. Electronic voting systems are actually failing and breaking down nationwide, creating long voting lines and the risk of votes lost to error and malfunction. We can fight this fraud because we can see it, like the part of the iceberg that is above the water. But yes, there is more below.

New Election Scandal Cuts Millions of Voters from the Rolls

November 4, 2014 Redacted Tonight, www.facebook.com/redactedtonight ,
Just when it seemed like our voting system couldn’t be any more corrupt, it rises to the challenge. Millions of Americans are unable to vote in these Midterm Elections because they’re being accused of “Double Voting.” The so-called “Voter Purge” makes it impossible in over half the states in the union to vote, if you have the same name as someone else in another state. And since almost no one votes in Midterm elections, let alone twice, the Redacted Team illustrates step-by-step how this new form of voter suppression works.

JP Morgan Chase Sued For Debt Fraud

January 15, 2014 Chris Cumming, americanbanker.com , ,
JPMorgan Chase (JPM) pressured customers to repay debts they did not owe, sold collections agencies rights to credit card accounts that had been extinguished in bankruptcy and tolerated frequent errors by its third-party collections attorneys, according to a lawsuit filed by Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood on Tuesday. The state's complaint is, despite significant redactions, the most detailed and potentially damning attack so far on JPMorgan Chase's credit card debt collections operation, which the bank has shut down. JPMorgan Chase declined to comment on the Mississippi complaint through a spokesman. The bank ceased filing suits to collect consumer debt in the spring of 2011, following a probe by the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency into the legitimacy of its collections lawsuits.

How Highly Paid CEOs Rip Off Their Companies And Public

August 29, 2013 Sarah Anderson, www.alternet.org , ,
Heimbold’s story is actually not that uncommon. In a report I co-authored at the Institute for Policy Studies, we analyzed 18 extremely highly paid CEOs who led companies that had to shell out more than $100 million in fraud-related settlements. Eleven of the CEOs had left their firms before the fraud charges were fully resolved. This finding is part of a larger IPS “performance review” of CEOs who made the annual top 25 highest-paid lists over the past 20 years. Theoretically, these CEOs should be the cream of the crop of American corporate leadership. But instead of stellar performance, we found that nearly 40 percent were bad performers -- even by the most narrow, incontrovertible definitions. Twenty-two percent led firms that crashed or got bailed out in the 2008 crisis. Another eight percent had to pay massive settlements for fraud. And yet another eight percent wound up getting fired. Even the guys who got the boot didn’t suffer too much. The size of their average golden parachute: $48 million.
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