Business-Ethics Stories Figure in National and International News
Nov 13th, 2007 • Posted in: NewsVARIOUS DATELINES
Allegations of improper fees and payments and a gigantic lawsuit over the effects of a once-popular drug made headlines worldwide last week:
- As home foreclosures mushroom, the New York Times reports that questionable legal and ethical practices on the part of companies instigating the foreclosures are coming to light. According to the Times, because there is little oversight of foreclosure procedures and attendant fees, some analysts claim that consumers may be losing their homes unnecessarily or are being charged improper fees by mortgage services trying to profit from the foreclosures. Katherine Porter, a law professor at the University of Iowa, told the Times that questionable fees had been tacked on to almost half of the loans that she examined, and in many cases the fees were cloaked in vague language.
- Siemens, the German engineering and technology giant mired in a bribery scandal, last week said that an internal probe had uncovered about $1.9 billion in “questionable transactions,” according to the Berlin-based news service Deutsche Welle. And according to a report from SpiegelOnline, the dubious payments, which are suspected of being used for slush funds and bribery in countries outside Germany, appear to come from divisions of the company not previously implicated.
- South Korea has been rocked by allegations that Samsung Group chairman Lee Kun-hee was at the heart of a scheme of bribery and illegal transactions, according to a report from the Korea Times. A group of lawyers and civic groups last week filed a request with state prosecutors to open an official probe into allegations made by a former Samsung attorney who claims he was complicit in the wrongdoing and now wants to repent and blow the whistle, BusinessWeek reports.
- Grocery chain Whole Foods has changed its corporate ethics policy and now will ban company leaders from posting anything about the company online. The policy follows a controversy over postings by CEO John Mackey, who anonymously bashed his competitors and talked up his own company’s stock, ComputerWorld reports. Critics claimed he was surreptitiously trying to influence circumstances surrounding his firm’s proposed takeover of another company.
- Pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co. last week agree to pay up to $4.85 billion to settle lawsuits involving the company’s drug Vioxx, which plaintiffs claim is linked to strokes and heart attacks. The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that the settlement, offered in order to close out more than 26,000 state and federal cases, was lower than what most analysts had expected. Merck took a hard line, threatening to fight every case individually, and admitted no wrongdoing in proposing the settlement, which must be approved by at least 85 percent of the plaintiffs by next March.
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