Keppel Offshore to Pay $422 Million to End Bribery Probe

Keppel Offshore & Marine Ltd., the world’s biggest builder of oil rigs, agreed to pay $422 million to end a U.S. bribery probe into illegal payments to officials at Petroleo Brasileiro SA, Brazil’s state-owned oil company, and to the then-governing political party.

Keppel units paid about $55 million to win 13 contracts with Petrobras and another company, U.S. prosecutors said in a press release after an American subsidiary pleaded guilty in federal court in Brooklyn, New York. The payments were part of outsize commissions to an intermediary and disguised as consulting agreements, according to prosecutors.

“The defendants used the global financial system –- including the United States banking system–to disguise the source and disbursement of the bribe payments by passing funds through a series of shell companies," Bridget Rohde, acting U.S. Attorney in Brooklyn, said in a statement. read more »

Justice Department recovers $2.4 billion in fraud cases in 2017

Mylan paid $465 million. Shire Pharmaceuticals paid $350 million. Life Care Centers of America paid $145 million. And eClinicalWorks paid $155 million.

Those were the biggest healthcare fraud and abuse recoveries reported by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2017.

For the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, Justice recovered more than $2.4 billion in total settlements and judgments from healthcare firms for alleged fraud affecting Medicare, Medicaid and TriCare. read more »

Kmart Corporation to Pay U.S. $32.3 Million to Resolve False Claims Act Allegations for Overbilling Federal Health Programs for Generic Prescription Drugs

The agreement resolves allegations arising from a lawsuit brought under the qui tam, or whistleblower, provisions of the False Claims Act, which permit private citizens with knowledge of fraud against the government to bring an action on behalf of the United States and to share in any recovery.  The 2008 lawsuit, which was filed by James Garbe in the federal district in Los Angeles and later transferred to the Southern District of Illinois, alleged that Kmart pharmacies offered discounted generic drug prices to cash-paying customers through various club programs but knowingly failed to disclose those prices when reporting to federal health programs its usual and customary prices, which are typically used by those programs to establish reimbursement rates. read more »

JPMorgan pays $2.8 million fine over improper safeguards for customers

JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N) will pay $2.8 million to settle charges that a broker-dealer unit lacked sufficient controls to safeguard customer securities from several countries over more than eight years, a U.S. regulator said on Wednesday.

The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority said JPMorgan Clearing Corp created hundreds of millions of dollars of deficits by violating U.S. rules designed to thwart the improper commingling of assets.

Such rules are intended to avoid delays in returning customer securities, or the inability to make customers whole, when broker-dealers fail. read more »