SEC Charges Mozido Founder Michael Liberty Of Defrauding 200 Investors

Michael Liberty advertised that Mozido, the start-up he founded which once boasted a valuation of $5.6 billion, would revolutionize mobile payments and bring financial services to 2 billion unbanked adults worldwide. But securities regulators claim Liberty hyped up Mozido while raising $55 million that mostly went into his own pocket.

The Securities & Exchange Commission has sued Liberty for fraud in federal court in Maine, saying Liberty stole most of the $55 million he purportedly raised for Mozido from 200 individual investors. Instead, the SEC claims, those investors funded shell companies controlled by Liberty, who used the money for private jet flights, expensive homes and cars, a dairy cow farm in Maine, and even a movie his then girlfriend, Brittany Abbas, was producing. read more »

2 Founders of $32 Million Centra Virtual Currency Project Are Arrested

Federal authorities have arrested two founders of a virtual currency that raised $32 million from investors last year and won an endorsement from the boxer Floyd Mayweather.

The co-founders of the Centra virtual currency, Sam Sharma and Robert Farkas, were arrested on Sunday, a day before the Securities and Exchange Commission released a complaint against the men and announced that it was halting the project.

Centra raised $32 million last summer and fall in a so-called initial coin offering, a method of fund-raising in which companies sell custom virtual currencies. The Centra team said at the time that the Centra token would give investors access to a new virtual currency exchange and a virtual currency debit card that would operate on the Visa and Mastercard networks.

The S.E.C. said in its complaint that the Centra team had never received approval from Visa and Mastercard and had misled investors on several other counts. The S.E.C. said that several of the executives listed on the Centra website were fictitious. read more »

Ticketmaster Denies Report It Stifles Concert-Access Competition

Ticketmaster Entertainment Inc. says it isn’t stifling competition in the concert industry, pushing back against a report that the U.S. Department of Justice is probing whether its parent company is abiding by an antitrust agreement from eight years ago.

Justice Department officials are looking into possible cases where parent Live Nation Entertainment Inc. pressured venues in Atlanta, Las Vegas and other cities into using Ticketmaster to sell tickets to those shows or lose the venue business, the New York Times reported Sunday. The Times cited emails shown to it by Ticketmaster’s main rival, AEG.

Live Nation bought Ticketmaster in 2010 and agreed to a set of rules, called a consent decree, to ensure it wouldn’t gain a monopoly on live music promotion and ticketing. read more »

Swiss drugmaker Novartis faces bribery allegations in China

Pharmaceutical company has become entangled in bribery allegations in China, in spite of efforts in fighting rampant commercial corruption in the medical sector, industry representatives said on Tuesday.

An employee at Swiss multinational pharmaceutical company Novartis International AG's affiliate in China accused the drugmaker of money laundering via funding fake academic activities in a post published on Zhihu, China's Quora-like platform, on Monday, according to a report by domestic financial news site eeo.com.cn.

To promote the company's new drugs such as benazepril and DIOVAN (valsartan) tablets, the company held fake academic activities and paid clinical doctors kickbacks, according to eeo.com.cn. read more »