Tesla Whistleblower Ups Ante, Making a Formal Complaint With the SEC

Martin Tripp, the ex-Tesla employee accused by Elon Musk of sabotage inside the company’s facilities, has struck back by filing a whistleblowing complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The move is the latest in what has become a legal game of chess between the closely watched company and a process engineering technician who claims he grew disenchanted with the $54 billion automaker.

Tripp’s whistleblower complaint filed with the SEC includes accusations that the former Tesla employee has disclosed to the press before: Tesla overstated to investors the number of Model 3 vehicles being produced each week by as much as 44%; batteries with puncture holes were installed into Tesla vehicles; and the company systematically reused scrap and waste parts in vehicles. read more »

Goal For FIFA After The World Cup: Recruit Whistleblowers

No matter how exciting the World Cup games have been, the tarnish of widespread bribery and corruption within FIFA’s ranks has diminished the Cup’s luster.

Serious doubts remain that much will change despite a change in leadership, the criminal prosecution of dozens of FIFA executives and marketing officials, and pledges by FIFA officials to clean up governance of the world’s most popular sport.

FIFA’s corruption problems are mind-boggling: Millions paid to secure votes from numerous FIFA executives who determine World Cup host countries, millions more paid to win contracts to televise soccer matches, and even threats against those who have revealed some of FIFA’s dirty secrets.

Clearly, FIFA’s culture and practices need to be reset, and any lingering problems must be rooted out. read more »

JPMorgan Whistle-Blower Gets Record $30 Million From CFTC

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has finalized a $30 million whistle-blower award for information that helped the agency sue JPMorgan Chase & Co. for failing to properly inform some wealthy clients about conflicts of interest behind its investment recommendations, according to the private attorney who brought the case.

The CFTC made the award public on Thursday without naming individuals or the bank. According to the attorney, Edward Siedle, it was the culmination of a December 2015 settlement in which JPMorgan agreed to pay regulators a total of $367 million for failing to disclose that it was steering asset-management clients into investments that would be especially profitable to the bank.

That included $100 million that went to the CFTC -- $40 million in penalties and $60 million in disgorgement. The bank agreed to pay an additional $267 million at the time to the Securities and Exchange Commission, where a pair of preliminary whistle-blower awards totaling $61 million were authorized a year ago but still await final approval.

The CFTC’s award is the fifth in the history of its program and eclipses a previous $10 million record announced in 2016. The latest award is also the CFTC’s first since July 2016, when it announced it was paying approximately $50,000 to an unidentified recipient for providing original information that led to a successful enforcement action. read more »

Why McKinsey’s apology might not be enough

Sorry, the song goes, seems to be the hardest word. But in the case of McKinsey’s newly minted global head Kevin Sneader, it was the centrepiece of his mea culpa to the SA business community as he gave a thoroughly Japanese-like apology for his company’s involvement in state capture through its deals with Eskom, Transnet, Trillian and Regiments Capital.

Sneader still took a lashing. At an event this week hosted by the Gordon Institute of Business Science, he was grilled by attendees like Business Leadership SA’s unforgiving head Bonang Mohale, Corruption Watch’s David Lewis, JSE chair Nonkululeko Nyembezi and the media.

Nicola Kleyn, dean of the business school, told Sneader that he’d "dived into a pool of pain", while Mohale lambasted a business community that he said had profited from corruption in state-owned companies while giving little back.

"Context in SA is everything," said Mohale. "You are part of a business community that after 350 years didn’t even ask for forgiveness, just took forgiveness. After taking it, you still behaved in the manner that you did, so I’m hoping you’ll begin to understand not only the frustration but the bone-deep anger."

And this was one of Mohale’s more restrained criticisms.

Sneader’s apology came on the same day that McKinsey repaid Eskom R902m of a R1.6bn fee it received in 2016 (without adding interest).

He admitted that McKinsey’s governance processes had failed when in 2015 it contracted Regiments as its empowerment partner to help Eskom save money and build internal engineering capacity. read more »