Nomura Agrees to Pay $480 Million Over Crisis-Era Securities

Nomura Holding America Inc. and affiliates agreed to pay a $480 million penalty to resolve U.S. claims that the bank misled investors in marketing and selling mortgage-backed securities tied to the 2008 financial crisis, according to the Justice Department.

Tokyo-based Nomura is one of the last banks to settle with U.S. authorities over its handling of securities backed by some low-quality loans. read more »

The College-Basketball Bribery Trial Makes Agents and Sneaker Companies Seem Like the Good Guys

In a case involving the covert passing of envelopes stuffed with cash, no one looks as guilty as the N.C.A.A.

It is hard, as the parent of young boys, to feel any sympathy for the giant sports-apparel companies—Nike, Adidas, Under Armour—whose brands begin lodging themselves in four-year-old brains with the stickiness of cotton candy. But such is the position I nearly found myself in, last week, while listening to opening statements in the first of three trials in downtown Manhattan that threaten to expose “the dark underbelly of college basketball,” as federal prosecutors have put it. read more »

Danske Bank's Culture Of Silence Implodes, Thanks To A Whistleblower

Behind Danske Bank’s money-laundering scandal was a pervasive culture of silence that flourished despite the fact that many people knew or suspected for years that the bank’s Estonian branch was laundering billions of dollars.

It took a whistleblower who is a former Danske official to spark serious investigations into the tiny Estonian unit, which handled more than $235 billion in non-resident transactions from 2007 to 2015 – including an untold amount that was due to money laundering.

The Danske case shows the top-to-bottom failure of management, internal auditors and regulators to detect and stop the laundering of billions of dollars in criminal proceeds from Russia and other former Soviet states, while also demonstrating the impact that a whistleblower can have by speaking up. read more »

Indal to pay $3.5 million to settle U.S. allegations: Justice Department

The Department of Justice announced today that Indal Technologies Inc. (Indal) has agreed to pay $3.5 million to resolve allegations that it knowingly sold defective helicopter landing systems designed for U.S. Navy destroyers.  Indal, of Ontario, Canada, is a division within Curtiss-Wright Corporation of Charlotte, North Carolina. read more »