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Archive for the 'Legal woes' Category

Iran sanctions and PerkinElmer …

Tuesday, August 31st, 2010

The U.S. has restricted a slew of exports to the Islamic Republic of Iran. So when The Australian published an article (payment required) last spring describing a trade-show booth in Tehran that was showcasing an atomic absorption spectrometer made by Waltham, Massachusetts-based PerkinElmer (PKI), the Securities and Exchange Commission took notice. In a June 22 [...]

Blockbuster finally says the B-word…

Monday, August 16th, 2010

For the past few years, there’s been bankruptcy chatter about Blockbuster (BLOKA). Indeed, at times the speculation has been so rampant that company executives have had to actually issues statements to the media (see this story from last year and this interview with CEO Jim Keyes from this past June) that the company was not [...]

The scoop on Kraft’s coffee price fixing woes…

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010

One benefit from reading SEC filings is that they allow us to distill some of the details about matters that have previously only been reported in a general way. A good example comes from the 10-Q that Kraft Foods, Inc. (KFT) filed August 6. In early June, a story broke that Germany’s Federal Cartel Office [...]

A tale of two corruption settlements …

Monday, August 9th, 2010

Call us old-fashioned, but we think that a federal investigation for bribery or foreign corruption, even a small one relative to a company’s size, is significant, and warrants disclosure. We recently took General Electric (GE) to task for sweeping its own foreign corruption inquiry under the rug. Last Friday, the Securities and Exchange Commission and [...]

GE settlement follows silence over inquiry …

Tuesday, July 27th, 2010

It isn’t every day that one of the biggest industrial companies settles foreign bribery charges — and almost acknowledges the allegations in the process. Given that the company didn’t tell investors that the investigation was even underway, that’s not half bad. Today General Electric (GE) settled allegations by the Securities and Exchange Commission that several [...]