Abbott's Alere resolves U.S. diagnostic device probe for $33.2 million

Alere Inc has agreed to pay $33.2 million to resolve claims it knowingly sold unreliable diagnostic testing devices to hospitals prior to its acquisition by Abbott Laboratories last year, the U.S. Justice Department said on Friday.

The Justice Department said that Massachusetts-based Alere, from 2006 to 2012, sold its Triage-branded devices to hospitals that government healthcare programs paid for, despite receiving customer complaints about the erroneous results they produced. read more »

Facebook says warning to Guardian group 'not our wisest move'

GMG received legal letter from Facebook day before Observer report on mass data harvesting

Issuing a warning to the Guardian Media Group ahead of its publication of an exposé of mass Facebook data harvesting was not the wisest move, one of the social networking giant’s senior executives has said.

Addressing the FT Future of News conference, Campbell Brown, head of news partnerships at Facebook, said: “If it were me I would have probably not threatened to sue the Guardian,” adding it was “not our wisest move”.

GMG received a legal letter from Facebook the day before the Observer reported that a company harvested as many as 50m Facebook profiles of US voters for Cambridge Analytica and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box.  read more »

BofA to Pay N.Y. $42 Million Over Electronic Trading Probe

Bank of America Corp.’s corporate and investment banking division agreed to pay $42 million to settle a New York state probe into a so-called masking scheme in which it misled clients about who was seeing and filling their orders and who was trading in its dark pool.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch for years, starting in 2008, had trading agreements with electronic liquidity providers such as Citadel Securities, Knight Capital and Madoff Securities that were hidden from customers. read more »

Britain's SFO to recover $6 million from Chad oil corruption case

British prosecutors will recover 4.4 million pounds ($6.2 million) from a corruption case in which a Canadian energy company bribed Chadian diplomats in North America, the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) said on Thursday following a court ruling.

Canada’s Griffiths Energy, using a front company called “Chad Oil”, bribed senior diplomats at the Chadian Embassy to the United States with discounted share deals and payments in return for oil contracts in the central African nation, the SFO said.

Griffiths Energy, which changed its name to Caracal Energy Inc in 2013, pleaded guilty to corruption charges brought by Canadian authorities in the same year. read more »