Muhammad Naji of Tampa, FL, has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit laundering of money that was obtained by fraudulent means, announced U.S. Attorney A. Lee Bentley III.

Naji could face up to 20 years in federal prison, reports the Tampa Bay Business Journal.

“One of the schemes involved sending ‘phishing’ emails to law firms in the U.S. asking for legal representation for a phony contract dispute. Conspirators would mail a forged certified check to the law firm for payment, and a ‘client’ would contact the firm and ask them to wire the funds to an account,” the paper reports.

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Civil settlements recently have exceeded $260 million in federal litigation stemming from the ongoing U.S. criminal antitrust investigation into auto parts supplier price fixing, reports Automotive News.

U.S. District Judge Marianne Battani gave preliminary approval to a deal for TRW Automotive Holdings Corp. and German affiliate TRW Deutschland Holding GmbH to settle for $8 million with direct purchaser plaintiffs, which are other auto companies who allegedly bought components at colluded prices, the report says.

Since February, Hitachi Automotive Systems Ltd. and Panasonic Corp. have also agreed to pay nearly $83 million combined to settle with dealership and consumer plaintiffs.

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In Part 2 of its Anti-Bribery & Corruption Webinar Series, Aruvio presents a free on-demand webinar showing the importance of an organization showing that it has a strong, defensible compliance program in place that mitigates both risk and exposure to investigations.

The distributed and dynamic nature of business makes anti-bribery & corruption compliance a challenge. Compliance must be an active part of the organization and its culture to prevent and detect corruption, bribery and fraud, Aruvio says on its website. This continuous process must be monitored, maintained and nurtured. Ultimately, the best offense is a good defense: an organization must be prepared to show that it has a strong, defensible compliance program in place that mitigates both risk and exposure to investigations, penalties and possible prosecution.

Part 2 of this webinar series examines how you can enhance your enterprise’s anti-bribery and corruption compliance.

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Imperative Information Group has posted a free on-demand webinar considering the federal, state, and local issues surrounding employers’ evaluation of candidates’ criminal history information.

In order to effectively and consistently evaluate the criminal histories of prospective and current employees, it is important that employers consider which criminal offenses are relevant to specific jobs, Imperative Information Group says on its website.  Additionally, the age and frequency of offenses should also be considered when evaluating relevancy.

However, Mike Coffey, SPHR, president of Imperative Information Group, maintains that criminal records, even those that are not directly related to a particular position’s risk factors, may still be relevant in selecting the right candidate.

In addition to discussing issues surrounding employers’ evaluation of candidates’ criminal history information, Coffey will also review tools for developing and documenting policies concerning the impact of individuals’ criminal histories on their employment eligibility.

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Lawyers from BakerHostetler’s Privacy and Data Protection team hosted an informative webinar providing an in-depth discussion of the issues raised in the firm’s recent blog post on “FAQs by Employers Regarding the Anthem Data Breach.” That webinar is now available for free viewing on-demand.

The webinar covers legal obligations under HIPAA, the duty to notify, obligations for employers offering group plans, responding to employees’ concerns, obligations of ERISA fiduciaries, ERISA preemption of state law obligations, and recommended next steps.

The firm has made both the PowerPoint presentation and the recorded webinar available.

PowerPoint presentation | recorded webinar

A secret recording captures a rare inside look at two embattled executives grappling with the weight of a federal investigation into alleged bribery, according to a report at Nasdaq.com.

“In recent years, the U.S. Department of Justice has ramped up enforcement against companies that bribe overseas officials, but has settled most cases with companies out of court, leaving the human element of corporate corruption cases hidden from view. The video reveals some of the ambiguities executives can face when doing business in countries where corruption is rife,” the report says. “When is a payment to a well-connected consultant really a bribe? Who is to blame for a shared decision to make a payment when no one person understands the entire nature of the transaction?”

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Aruvio presents a free on-demand webinar about enterprises and other organizations preparing for increasingly challenging anti-bribery and corruption laws and intensified enforcement (e.g., FCPA, UK Bribery Act) in 2015.

Employees, suppliers and partners can expose the organization to related risk and liability that results in significant business sanctions and costs as well as damaged brand and reputation, the company says on its website. No organization can afford to let this risk go unmonitored. An organization must clearly understand evolving regulatory requirements plus changes and shifts in enforcement actions. Part 1 of this webinar series looks at how you can ensure your enterprise is ready for this year’s anti-bribery & corruption regulations.

Watch the on-demand webinar.

JPMorgan Chase & Co. agreed to pay $99.5 million to settle its portion of an antitrust lawsuit in which investors accuse 12 major banks of rigging prices in the $5.3 trillion-a-day foreign exchange market, reports Reuters.

The settlement is the first in the nationwide litigation and resolved claims over JPMorgan’s role in alleged collusion among banks since January 2003 to manipulate the WM/Reuters Closing Spot Rates, known as the Fix.

Investors including hedge funds, pension funds and the city of Philadelphia accused the 12 banks, which controlled 84 percent of the global currency trading market, of having impeded competition by conspiring to manipulate the Fix in chat rooms, instant messages and emails.

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The former general counsel of a bankrupted South Florida law firm that was at the center of a massive fraud was sentenced Jan. 30 to 18 months in federal prison for his role in helping managing partner Scott Rothstein swindle investors by selling them “income” from faked settlements, reports the ABA Journal.

David Boden, 53, has cooperated with the government from the start and is expected to testify against other defendants charged in connection with the schemes for which the former Rothstein Rosenfeldt Adler chief is now serving 50 years. Prosecutors said Boden verified that the claimed settlements sold by Rothstein, which involved fictitious individuals and entities, were legitimate.

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The U.S. Supreme Court declined Jan. 26 to hear an appeal by a former BP Plc executive who contested whether he can be charged with obstruction of Congress for downplaying the severity of the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill, Reuters reports.

Prosecutors say David Rainey, the company’s exploration vice president, misled members of Congress over the amount of oil spilled in the April 2010 Deepwater Horizon incident.

Reuters says Rainey’s legal argument on appeal was that the government missed the deadline to file an appeal after a district court judge dismissed his obstruction charge.

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Can the Federal Bureau of Investigation wire up your longtime company counsel and then use recordings of the conversations against you in court? The answer – as reported in The Wall Street Journal‘s Risk & Compliance Journal – is often yes, according to legal experts and a ruling by a New Jersey federal judge.

Joseph Sigelman, the ousted chief executive of oil services firm PetroTiger, was seeking to have a secretly recorded conversation with his former general counsel turned informant, barred from his coming trial for foreign bribery. Sigelman, who maintains his innocence, argued that the secret video recording made with a camera attached to the lawyer Gregory Weisman, who also sometimes served as his personal attorney, violated his right to attorney-client confidentiality, The Journal reports.

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The French industrial giant Alstom has agreed to plead guilty and pay the largest fine ever levied by the United States for foreign bribery.

The plea will bring a $772 million penalty in a bribery investigation led by the U.S. Justice Department.

Alstom, an energy and transportation company, had been under investigation in a plot involving tens of millions of dollars in bribes paid to government officials in Indonesia and other countries to win power contracts, reports The New York Times.

“Alstom’s corruption scheme was sustained over more than a decade and across several continents,” said James Cole, deputy attorney general. “It was astounding in its breadth, its brazenness and its worldwide consequences.”

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Alstom SA pleaded guilty and agreed to pay a record $772 million to end a U.S. Justice Department investigation into bribes paid to win power-plant contracts in Indonesia and other countries, Bloomberg News reports.

The fine is the largest criminal penalty paid to the Justice Department under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

Bloomberg News reports that Alstom Chief Executive Officer Patrick Kron said on Dec. 19 that the Levallois-Perret-based company will pay the fines connected to its energy businesses as its shareholders voted in favor of their sale to General Electric Co. GE agreed in June to buy most of the assets for $15.2 billion, GE’s biggest acquisition ever, and the purchase should close next year.

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Many large retailers remain woefully unprepared to defend against a cyber attack, according to security experts quoted in a report in The San Jose Mercury News.

Cyber thieves are smarter and more efficient at breaking into retailers’ networks and stealing consumer data, and some credit card companies are ratcheting down fraud protection to speed transactions during the shopping rush. That sets up the holidays to potentially be a whammy of a payday for criminal groups — and puts consumers at greater risk as they enter the biggest shopping season of the year.

The report says consumers can expect to pay — as retailers face mounting fines from financial regulators for data breaches, and must invest in pricey new security systems, some experts expect the costs will be passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices.

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An alert issued by the FBI on Monday is warning about a type of computer malware that has the ability to destroy any system it infects, reports CSO on its website. The memo, #A-000044-MW, was obtained by Salted Hash from a source that wishes to remain anonymous.

Those who have seen the memo, including the group where it was first shared, are speculating that it’s related to the incident at Sony Pictures.

In both cases – South Korea then, and Sony Pictures now – the malware forced the victim’s networks offline according to local reports out of Korea and Sony’s own employees, CSO said.

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The Securities and Exchange Commission has charged two top ex-officers of a company that operates assisted living centers with listing fake occupants at several senior residences to meet the terms of a lease and misrepresenting in regulatory filings that the company was in compliance with the lease.

A report from the SEC says the alleged fraud orchestrated by Assisted Living Concepts Inc.’s former CEO, Laurie Bebo, and former CFO John Buono between 2009 and early 2012 even extended to directing ALC staff to falsely identify Bebo’s parents and husband as residents of facilities that the company rented from Ventas Inc. Another of the purported senior residents was just seven years old, the SEC said in a news release on Wednesday.

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Health care and biotech companies are increasingly seeing attacks by cyber criminals, reports the San Diego Union-Tribune.

Those criminals are looking for the trove of valuable details the companies hold — stock information, research secrets and even patients’ personal data, industry experts said.

At the same time, the health and life-science sectors are underprepared for the assault from such sophisticated thieves. Well-planned “phishing” attacks and confidence tricks fool executives, scientists and hospital workers, who are often pressured to put productivity ahead of good online security practices, the Union-Tribune reports.

“Health care, a sector that accounts for one-sixth of the nation’s economy, makes an obvious target for fraud. The industry is increasingly exposed to hacking as records traditionally kept on paper are computerized. And the trend is likely to grow because the federal government is funding the adoption of electronic health records nationwide,” the newspaper says.

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Bank of Tokyo Mitsubishi UFJ, also known as BTMU, agreed in a settlement Nov. 18 with financial regulators to move its money laundering and sanctions compliance unit from Tokyo to New York. The agreement was part of a deal with New York’s financial regulator.

The bank also agreed to pay $315 million for misleading the regulator’s office about transactions involving countries subject to U.S. economic sanctions, reported The Wall Street Journal. The fine comes on top of a $250 million fine the bank paid in 2013 to the New York Superintendent of Financial Services.

The move will give the compliance unit supervision over all transactions involving the bank’s New York branch, including those that originate overseas.

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Any business transaction involving simple negotiations could be subject to prosecution, former Jefferies & Co. managing director Jesse Litvak warned an appeals court in an attempt to have his securities fraud conviction thrown out, Bloomberg Businessweek reported.

Litvak, found guilty in March of lying to customers about the price of mortgage-backed securities, on Nov. 18 asked the U.S. Court of Appeals in Manhattan to throw out the conviction, saying it could be used to turn “garden-variety statements” made in all kinds of negotiations — even car lot negotiations — into the basis for charges.

“Every car salesman who tells a customer that he cannot lower his price any further because he would earn only a minuscule profit on the sale as it is would be guilty of fraud,” Litvak’s lawyers said in a filing.

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The U.S. Department reported that Gregory E. Grantham, 57, of Oceanside, California, was sentenced to five years in prison on Nov. 14 , followed by three years of supervised release, for a wire fraud conspiracy, wire fraud and obstruction of justice. U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz also ordered Grantham to forfeit/ pay restitution of $17.4 million.

DOJ reports:

Grantham is a licensed attorney and between September 2009 and September 2011, was employed as General Counsel for IAGU Underwriters, LLC, as well as maintaining a private law practice. Graham’s co-defendant, Mervyn Phelan operated IAGU, which was in the business of underwriting loan applications submitted by real estate developers and then locating project financing from banks and other financial entities.

According to his plea agreement and court documents, between mid-2010 and August 2011, Grantham and Phelan became involved in a fraudulent scheme carried out by Patrick Belzner and Brian McCloskey, who both resided in Baltimore County. McCloskey owned a real estate development business known as the McCloskey Group, LLC. Belzner, a home builder, began working with McCloskey in late 2008 or early 2009. Phelan and IAGU began working with the McCloskey Group trying to locate sources of financing for its projects in about 2009.

Beginning in 2009 and continuing through June 2011, Belzner and McCloskey persuaded a series of private lenders to fund loans to establish that the McCloskey Group had reserves of cash that would supposedly help it obtain loans it was seeking in connection with real estate development projects through IAGU. Belzner and McCloskey falsely represented that the funds would be maintained in an escrow account under the control of Kevin Sniffen, a licensed attorney and escrow agent in Baltimore County; that the funds would not be used for any other purpose; and that the money would be returned to the lender, either upon the funding of the loan or after a specified period of time. In return for this temporary use of the lender’s funds, Belzner and McCloskey promised to pay substantial fees or interest. In fact, once the lenders transferred their funds into the escrow accounts, Belzner directed McCloskey to remove those funds from the escrow accounts without the knowledge or permission of the lenders. Belzner and McCloskey then used the majority of the stolen funds to pay for their personal and business expenses. The total losses resulting from the scheme were approximately $20 million.

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