General Electric was not only the only company to find itself in hot water this week. Huron Consulting Group out of Chicago, like GE, is now staring down its own accounting scandal with the CEO and CFO already casualties.
Yesterday it was announced that GE would be paying a $50 settlement fine to the SEC in response to a civil suit filed by the agency against the company for accounting fraud. GE is paying the fine, but without admitting guilt nor denying the allegations.
Deborah Duffy, the Chief Compliance Officer at WG Trading Co., has plead guilty to a civil suit brought against her by the SEC for money laundering, securities fraud, and conspiracy.
Dr. Timothy Kuklo, currently of Washington University and formerly an Army surgeon, is accused of accepting nearly $800,000 from Medtronic and then falsifying research about some of the company’s major products.
In the biggest multi-party indictment of individuals yet under the FCPA, six more former executives of Control Components Inc. (CC1), were charged with conspiring to win contracts by bribing officials at foreign state-owned companies.
The latest update in the infamous Satyam scandal involves even more fraud: Satyam created fake customer invoices, with amounts in the thousands, to misrepresent revenue and profits. The size of the Satyam scam is now believed to be near $2 billion.
The litany of allegations and fines against Halliburton continued this week as the company agreed to pay a record $559 million fine as part of a settlement for charges that a Haliburton subsidiary, KBR Inc., bribed Nigerian officials during a gas deal.
As the accounting scandal at Satyam rocks the economy of Indian, many are calling it India’s Enron. The founder and chairman of Satyam, Ramalinga Raju, resigned on Wednesday after disclosing that profits had been falsely inflated for years.
Breaking news out of Illinois: The Illinois House of Representatives has impeached Governer Rob Blagojevich. 60 of the possible 155 votes were required for impeachment. The Illinois House voted 114-1 to impeach Blagojevich.
The SEC is broadening its probe into many compliance-related issues at the heart of the Bernie Madoff scandal. At issue, according to David Kotz, is the potential that Madoff’s presence on SEC advisory committees somehow influenced the SEC investigation.
