Mortgage fraud cases soar to a 22-year high
Mortgage fraud has nearly quadrupled in the first six months of 2010, KPMG's "fraud barometer" has found, with incidents of deception involving home loans reaching a 22-year high.  The accountancy firm's figures show there were 21 cases of mortgage fraud in the first half of 2010 with a value of £96m, compared to just 18 worth £24m during the same period last year. In fact, the figure for the whole of 2009 was just £77m. Click here for the full story >>

(For more detail see also: http://rd.kpmg.co.uk/mediareleases/22725.htm)

AstraZeneca agrees $198m Seroquel settlement
AstraZeneca has settled one part of a dispute over its anti-psychosis drug Seroquel, agreeing to pay $198m to 17,500 US claimants. The settlement comes out of a court-ordered mediation in which plaintiffs said they were not warned that the drug could cause diabetes in some users. The company maintains that its labelling has made clear any potential associations between Seroquel and the disease. It has won the first US trials over the drug. Click here for the full story >>

Costs of BP oil spill increase to $6 billion
BP's estimate of its costs for the Gulf of Mexico oil spill have spiralled by more than $2 billion over the past three weeks to $6.1 billion, the company said yesterday. The news came as BP confirmed it had made an initial deposit of $3 billion into a $20 billion escrow fund to pay for the spill. Click here for the full story >>
   

Alliance One units plead guilty in US bribery case
Alliance One's Swiss unit was accused of paying bribes to Thai government officials to win contracts with the Thailand Tobacco Monopoly, a government agency. Its Kyrgyz unit was accused of paying bribes to buy local tobacco.  The Justice Department also said it had reached a plea deal with the Brazilian unit of Universal Corp (UVV.N) over charges related to bribes paid to officials with the Thailand Tobacco Monopoly for the sale of Brazilian tobacco. Click here for the full story >>

Organised crime infiltrates EU wind industry
Europe’s booming wind energy industry is being exploited by criminals who see the opportunity to tap into billions of euros’ worth of European Union subsidies, according to Kroll, the corporate investigations and security group. Kroll, he added, was doing brisk business conducting due diligence on renewable energy projects on behalf of big banks and other potential investors.  The American-owned Kroll has detected a sharp increase since 2007 in the number of cases involving fraud and corruption in the wind energy sector — chiefly in Italy and Spain but also in Bulgaria, Romania and other parts of Central and Eastern Europe. Click here for the full story >>

Innospec executive fined over bribes to boost sales of toxic fuel additives
A British businessman has been prosecuted for helping to pay multi-million dollar bribes to numerous officials to increase the sales of a poisonous chemical to poor countries. David Turner, 55, has been penalised for his role in a widespread bribery scheme to sell the toxic fuel additive to Iraq and Indonesia after it was banned from cars in western countries. Leaded petrol was outlawed after it was linked to brain damage in children. Anti-corruption campaigners say this contrasts with the British government's struggle to prosecute firms which engage in foreign bribery to win contracts Click here for the full story >>

FTSE director bonuses soar
Bonuses for the directors of the UK’s biggest companies rose sharply this year after a rebound in share prices and corporate earnings exceeded 2009 performance targets tailored for a bleaker economic environment. Bonuses for the highest FTSE 100 company directors rose to an average of about 120 per cent of base salary compared with 90 per cent in the last financial year, according to a report from Hewitt New Bridge Street, a remuneration consultancy. The rise in bonuses coincided with the number of blue-chip companies freezing executive directors’ salaries – which fell from 60 per cent last year to 33 per cent this year – with the average base salary for the highest paid directors rising from £800,000 ($1.3m) to £823,000. Click here for the full story >>

Google's South Korean office raided
Police in South Korea have raided Google's Seoul headquarters as part of an investigation into data collected by the company's Street View cars. The search giant has admitted to accidentally intercepting fragments - amounting to 600MB - of personal data through Wi-Fi networks in more than 30 countries as it sought to map towns and cities. Click here for the full story >>

Company bosses enjoy £500,000 pay increases
The incendiary debate over executive pay awards and bonuses was reignited yesterday when research revealed that the average pay package among the UK's top executives increased by £500,000 in the past financial year, while ordinary employees' salaries at a third of Britain's biggest companies remained frozen. Click here for the full story >>

Over 50 and on the scrapheap: As recession bites, a record rise in older workers condemned to long-term unemployment
The recession has created a generation of over-50s who are condemned to long- term unemployment, disturbing new figures revealed last night.  The number of older workers trapped in a spiral of joblessness has soared by more than 50 per cent in a year to the highest figure in a decade.  A total of 170,000 job-seekers over 50 have been out of work for at least 12 months, according to research for the charity Age UK, which warned of a ‘devastating legacy of unemployment’. Click here for the full story >>

Human rights groups ask Wikileaks to censor files
A coalition of human rights groups has called on Wikileaks to remove details of civilian Afghans who were named when the website released more than 77,000 classified US Army documents on the war in Afghanistan. In a series of emails sent to the website's founder, Julian Assange, the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC), Amnesty International and three other prominent rights groups called on the whistleblower website to expunge the names of Afghans mentioned in the war logs because of fears that they could be targeted by insurgents. Nader Nadery, from the AIHRC, said he and the four other rights groups in Kabul had written emails to Mr Assange but had yet to hear back from the Wikileaks founder. Click here for the full story >>

Christian council worker loses case over 'God' comment
A committed Christian who was sacked from his council job after suggesting to a terminally-ill woman she "put her faith in God" has lost his case. An employment tribunal ruled that it was reasonable for Wandsworth Council to dismiss Duke Amachree, after he was sacked for gross misconduct for suggesting to a client with an incurable illness not to give up hope and to try putting her faith in God. The Christian Legal Centre, which backed the case, argued that the council's decision to dismiss him was grossly disproportionate and unfair, and that they had discriminated against him on the basis of his religion. Click here for the full story >>

Hollywood greens up with environmental database
The Producers Guild of America on Wednesday unveiled www.greenproductionguide.com - a database of environmentally-friendly products and services from vendors across the United States. The move is the latest push in Hollywood's efforts to clean up its "green" act and is backed by funding from Walt Disney, Fox, NBC Universal, Sony Pictures Entertainment and Warner Bros.  A new website with resources on everything from recycling sets to cruelty-free mascara makes it simple to do so. Click here for the full story >>

New York publisher sues UBS over alleged plagiarism
Energy Intelligence Group alleges that material from a number of its oil and gas titles – including International Oil Daily, Petroleum Intelligence and World Gas Intelligence – turned up in UBS's daily oil news bulletin over an extended period. It also confirms that the UBS oil analyst Jon Rigby, who is responsible for putting together the bulletins, has for some time held a subscription to Energy Intelligence Group publications. But it says that the publisher cannot be certain of the full extent of the copying, or how widely the material was subsequently distributed. The publisher's claims that UBS has plagiarised its output "in a systematic manner over a long period of time" in order to boost its profile and reputation "amongst its customers and potential customers". Click here for the full story >>

One in 10 workers report sexual harassment at work
Sexual harassment is at dangerous levels in the workplace with a joint Reuters/Ipsos global poll finding one in 10 workers have been pestered for sex by a senior employer.  The survey of about 12,000 people in 24 countries found workers in India were the mostly likely to report sexual harassment with a report rate of 26 percent.  Only four percent of workers in Britain and Australia reported sexual harassment, five percent in Poland, Germany and Belgium, and six percent in Spain, Japan, Canada and Argentina. Seven percent of Hungarian workers reported sexual harassment. Click here for the full story >>

US probes corruption in big pharma
The US Department of Justice is scrutinising payments by leading pharmaceuticals companies for hospitality, consultants, licensing agreements and charitable donations in markets around the world as part of a wide-ranging corruption probe. GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer, Bristol-Myers Squibb and Eli Lilly, among others, have disclosed being contacted by the DoJ and Securities and Exchange Commission in connection with the investigation. Merck, the US drugs group, announced last week that it had also been contacted and was co-operating with investigators.  An industry attorney familiar with the probe said that the DoJ was looking at whether pharma companies had ignored a “systematic risk” inherent in the global drugs business and ignored obligations under local and US anti-bribery law. Click here for the full story >>

Civil servants' £3,450 bill for 'jazz theory of management'
Civil servants spent thousands of pounds of public money on jazz workshops, Indian head massages and trips to Blackpool Pleasure Beach and Newmarket Racecourse, the most detailed breakdown of government spending so far revealed yesterday.  Communities and Local Government became the first department to release details of all spending over £500 as part of a new drive for transparency. All government departments are going to have to publish details of spending on items worth more than £25,000 from November. But the communities department has gone further and released information about spending on items worth more than £500, because this is the disclosure rule that will apply to councils from later this year. Click here for the full story >>

BP fined £32.5m over oil refinery blast
Beleaguered oil giant BP agreed to pay a record £32.5 million fine for safety failings at its Texas City oil refinery after a 2005 explosion which killed 15 workers.  The fine is the largest penalty issued in the US Occupational Safety & Health Administration's (Osha) history. US Secretary of Labour Hilda L. Solis said the size of the penalty reflected BP's "disregard for workplace safety".  She said: "This agreement achieves our goal of protecting workers at the refinery and ensuring that critical safety upgrades are made as quickly as possible. Click here for the full story >>

Playboy forced to cover up for anti-porn Jobs
Playboy is censoring its output, and has promised to cover up its cover girls for the iPad edition to comply with Apple's strict no-nudity policy.  Apple's puritanical streak makes no business sense, but Jobs doesn't seem to mind. "We do believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone," Jobs wrote to a customer. "Folks who want porn can buy an Android phone."  But with Apple billing itself as the potential saviour of magazines and newspapers, its moral crusading is raising eyebrows within industries that tend to view any form of censorship with horror.  Earlier this year, Apple conducted a moral purge of its App Store even banning content that featured women in bikinis and lingerie. Click here for the full story >>

For fresh read frozen: false claims made by restaurants revealed
Three-quarters of restaurant, pub and cafe menus were found to be making bogus claims for "fresh", "local" or "hand-made" dishes which turned out to be cheaper versions using factory farmed meat, frozen fish or cash and carry food, trading standards officers revealed. Click here for the full story >>

HSBC subject to US money laundering probe
American authorities are investigating the US division of global banking group HSBC over its compliance with anti-money laundering procedures, according to a regulatory filing.  In the filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, which was posted last week, HSBC USA Inc. said that it has received subpoenas and other requests for information as part of the probe. “In response to these matters, we have taken several initial steps to address the concerns of our regulators by enhancing risk management and strengthening processes and the supporting infrastructure in our Bank Secrecy Act and Anti-Money Laundering functions,” the banking group added.  HSBC has said it fully supports government moves for appropriate disclosure by its citizens and does not condone or assist tax evasion. Click here for the full story >>

Apple manager accused of Asian kickbacks
An Apple supply manager has been accused of giving confidential information to Asian suppliers in exchange for kickbacks during a three-year scheme detailed in court filings made available over the weekend. Paul Devine, who procured components for iPod and iPhone headsets, was indicted by US federal authorities for wire fraud and money laundering in a document unsealed on Friday. Apple also sued Mr Devine in San Jose federal court. Devine was said to have given Apple’s internal price targets and other data to several suppliers, including a unit of big manufacturer Asustek of Taiwan, coaching them on how to bid for contracts. He set up a California company and opened bank accounts in his wife’s name in order to take in the kickbacks, transferring more than $500,000 in illicit proceeds, the indictment says. Click here for the full story >>

Europe v Wall St over big bonuses
The world’s biggest banks are embroiled in a row over attempts to clamp down on City bonuses. A split has now emerged on the issue between European and American banks. A group of the former, thought to be led by Stephen Green, HSBC’s chairman, has been urging restraint on pay packages. They fear any return to booming pay deals could prompt politicians across Europe to force through legislation restricting remuneration. The pay debate is expected to intensify in the next few weeks, ahead of an EU consultation paper on banker bonuses. Click here for the full story >>

Tony Blair’s Africa fund broke charity code
Tony Blair's charity has been rebuked by an official watchdog for trying to persuade its supporters to back Labour.  The former prime minister’s Africa Governance Initiative admitted it had been wrong to allow political propaganda to be sent to people who had shown interest in its humanitarian activities. The Charity Commission investigation is an embarrassment for Blair as he prepares to publish his memoirs next month, which are expected to net him at least £4.6m. The four-month probe also sheds light on the hidden links between Blair’s political, charitable and business activities. Click here for the full story >>

Longer hours on the rise again
The loss of nearly one million full-time jobs and a shift to part-time working since the start of the recession has resulted in a drop of almost 10% in the number of UK men working more than 45 hours per week. However, summer 2009 marked the low point in working time and since then the number of long-hours workers has started to rise again. Click here for the full story >>

American savers have smaller charges on personal pensions
Some British investors are paying 50 per cent more in fees on their pensions than Americans and are more likely to be left worse off due to conflicts of interest among those who sell them, according to a leading investment executive. Peter Robertson, the head of retail services at Vanguard UK, said the US system was far more transparent than its British counterpart about costs. British investors in personal pensions pay a “total expense ratio” [TER] of 1.66 per cent on their investments on average, according to Lipper, the financial researchers. In America, the average is about 1.1 per cent. Click here for the full story >>

Supermarket suppliers win right to complain
Supermarket suppliers will have the power to complain to a government adjudicator about their treatment by the big grocery chains, under plans published on Tuesday by the business department. The decision to appoint an adjudicator, rather than an ombudsman, comes after months of lobbying on the part of supermarket chains against the introduction of a watchdog. One executive of a big grocery chain said on Monday night that the industry had been privately preparing for some sort of regulatory scrutiny. Click here for the full story >>

Booming UK banks braced for bonus row
With HSBC, Standard Chartered and Barclays also set to publish first-half results, Britain's banks are are expected to report more than £8bn in profits in the next few days.  And rising profitability may also translate into bigger bonuses, further fuelling controversy. George Osborne, the Chancellor, said at the weekend that banks should use their new-found financial strength to boost lending, rather than pay either bonuses or dividends. His comments echoed earlier calls from Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, for bonus cash to be used for lending to small businesses. Click here for the full story >>

Business leaders eye joined-up reporting
Prince Charles has scored an unusual success. Six months ago he urged an influential group of business leaders, accountants and regulators to develop an internationally consistent approach to reporting on corporate sustainability. This week they launched an initiative to do just that.  The International Integrated Reporting Committee – which is supported by the 100 club of the UK’s top finance directors, top accountants and the Prince’s own not-for-profit group Accounting for Sustainability – will look at “joining up” the four silos of the annual report – financial statements, management commentary, information on governance and corporate social responsibility. Click here for the full story >>

RBS fined £5.6m over sanctions slip
Royal Bank of Scotland has been fined £5.6m – one of the largest penalties ever imposed by the financial regulator – for failing to ensure that funds were not transferred to terrorist groups or other people facing Treasury sanctions. The fine is the latest in a string of big penalties handed out by the Financial Services Authority as it seeks to take a tougher line with institutions that fail to comply with its objectives.  Click here for the full story >>

Now banks accused of causing mortgage famine
Britain's mortgage lenders are continuing to apply the brakes to the housing market, with new data revealing that mortgages remain far harder to get than before the credit crisis. Moneyfacts, the personal finance analyst, said that while the number of new mortgages being offered has risen by two-thirds since the beginning of the year, they are only available to borrowers with large deposits. Three in five of all the current mortgage deals in the UK require borrowers to have a deposit of at least a quarter of the value of the loan, although that does represent a marginal improvement on the previous funding famine. Click here for the full story >>

PR firms make London world capital of reputation laundering
An investigation by the Guardian has revealed that the capital's public relations firms are earning millions of pounds a year promoting foreign regimes with some of the world's worst human rights records, including Saudi Arabia, Rwanda, Kazakhstan and Sri Lanka. They are earning as much as £2m per contract to provide communications advice to governments whose records on issues such as torture, corruption and free speech have been attacked by international organisations including the United Nations and the Commonwealth. Click here for the full story >>

Brazilian company accused of killing 280,000 sharks for fins
A conservation watchdog Monday accused a Brazilian company of illegally fishing 280,000 sharks which were killed to feed Asia's appetite for sharkfin. The Environmental Justice Institute, a Brazilian group, lodged a suit against seafood exporter Sigel do Brasil Comercio demanding 800 million dollars in environmental damages. The company caught the sharks off the northern Brazilian state of Para between March 2009 and May 2010, according to information from the Brazilian state environmental agency Ibama given to the Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper. Click here for the full story >>

News Corp ties pay to performance
News Corp has tied senior management remuneration more closely to its financial performance in order to align the media group’s interests with those of its shareholders, the company has revealed in a regulatory filing.  Rupert Murdoch, the group’s chairman and chief executive; James Murdoch, his son and chief executive of Europe and Asia; Chase Carey, deputy chairman; and David DeVoe, chief financial officer, will now have two-thirds of their bonuses determined by a combination of financial and operating factors and the company’s share performance. The remainder will be based on “qualitative” judgments, such as the executive’s contribution to financial and non-financial objectives. Click here for the full story >>

Chipmaker Intel settles FTC antitrust lawsuit
US chipmaker Intel has settled an antitrust lawsuit filed against it by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Charges that Intel had "illegally stifled competition" have been resolved, the FTC said. Intel had been accused of "a systematic campaign to shut out rivals's competing microchips by cutting off their access to the marketplace". Intel is the world's largest chipmaker, making 80% of the microprocessors for the world's personal computers. There were no details on any money changing hands as a result of the settlement. Click here for the full story >>

Regulator bans BT broadband adverts
The advertisements that launched BT’s new super-fast broadband service, Infinity, have been banned after the regulator ruled their claims of “instant internet” were misleading. Last month Ofcom, the telecoms regulator, found the gap between advertised speeds and actual customer experience had widened over the past year, even as average speeds had risen. The Advertising Standards Authority received four complaints from consumers about national newspaper ads that trumpeted BT’s fibre-optic broadband service as “the birth of the instant internet”. Click here for the full story >>

Workers doing ‘homework’ at night
New research has suggested that many workers are completing up to 40 minutes of homework at night time, because they have too much work to get done in the working day.  The study of 3,000 workers, carried out by Reed Specialist Recruitment, also found that one in four employees is at their desk by 7.30a.m. and doesn’t get away until at least 6p.m., with 40% not even leaving their desks at lunchtime to get a proper break – the average break lasting just 33 minutes. Click here for the full story >>

Barclays defends lending as profits soar
Barclays has rejected claims that has restricted lending to households and businesses as it joined Britain’s other large banks in reporting a huge increase in profitability. Pre-tax profits for the bank, which unlike Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds did not use Government bailout money, rose 44 per cent to £3.9 billion in six months to June 30. The Bank of England’s latest figures show that lending to private companies was down 4.4 per cent in June compared with the same month last year. Click here for the full story >>

Competition inquiry over fears of Sky supremacy
The media watchdog Ofcom has referred the pay-TV film market to the Competition Commission in response to concerns that BSkyB is too dominant. The regulator cited the way that first-run Hollywood movies are sold and distributed as creating a situation where Sky has "the incentive and ability to distort competition". "The end result for consumers is less choice, less innovation and higher prices," Ofcom said. Click here for the full story >>

Lloyds insists it is working hard to help businesses
Lloyds banking Group insisted it was doing its best to support small businesses as the part-nationalised lender said it had turned a £3.9bn loss in the first half of 2009 into a £1.6bn profit this time around. The chief executive, Eric Daniels, defended the bank against claims that it was not doing enough to help small businesses, whose continued health will be crucial if Britain's shaky economic recovery is to prove sustainable. Click here for the full story >>

Network Rail to investigate 'lavish pay and perks' claims against chief executive
Rick Haythornthwaite, the Network Rail chairman, has vowed to investigate claims that the company's outgoing chief executive Iain Coucher enjoyed "lavish pay and perks" at the taxpayer's expense. The allegations have been made in a series of articles in satirical magazine Private Eye, and include details of how Mr Coucher allegedly had the use of a Coutts World Card which allowed him to draw up to £100,000 a day in business expenses. Other claims include that he was paid £20,000 a year for renting an elegant apartment in a Georgian square in central London and that he was paid £13,000 a year towards the cost of running his Aston Martin. Click here for the full story >>

BP spill leads to demand for more regulation
The majority of people in the US believe oil companies should be more regulated in the wake of BP’s oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, according to a Harris poll carried out for the Financial Times. At least 75 per cent of those aware of the spill in all countries surveyed support increased regulation, notably in Italy and Spain where nine out of 10 people are in favour. Britons, meanwhile, are least worried about regulating the oil companies, but even in the UK, 73 per cent of those surveyed said they agreed with greater regulation. Click here for the full story >>

Lapses mark out corporate morality tale
A letter from a lawyer representing a woman who had worked as a contractor to Hewlett-Packard and with whom the company’s chief executive had developed a close friendship.HP pointed to what it called a “close personal relationship” between Mr Hurd and the unnamed woman as one of the breaches of its standards of business conduct for which the chief was asked to resign. More significant, it now appears, were expenses that Mr Hurd submitted that involved dinners and possibly other situations involving the contractor. One person who has spoken with Mr Hurd said the woman’s name appeared on the expense claims. Click here for the full story >>

Look east, young unionists, for inspiration
Workers at a garment factory in Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital, went on strike at the end of last month in protest against the dismissal of one of their union officials. The factory produces for Gap, Benetton and Adidas, whose customers have long benefited from low-cost Asian labour. The large, even heroic, tasks of protecting rights might be declining sharply in developed nations. But they are increasingly common in the catch-up world – especially in China and south east Asia. In many recently (or still) communist countries, labour remains exploited and union activism is badly needed. Click here for the full story >>

Gap, Next and M&S in new sweatshop scandal
Some of the biggest names on the British high street are at the centre of a major sweatshop scandal. An Observer investigation has found staff at their Indian suppliers working up to 16 hours a day. Marks & Spencer, Gap and Next have all launched their own inquiries into the abuses and pledged to end the practice of excessive overtime, which is in flagrant breach of the industry's ethical trading initiative (ETI) a nd Indian labour law. Workers also say that those who refuse to work the extra hours have been told to find new jobs. Those in the factory supplying Gap and Next also claim staff who refused to work extra hours were threatened and fired, a practice defined under international law as forced labour and outlawed around the world. The factory has pledged to apologise and reinstate anyone who lost their job. Click here for the full story >>

Britain's appetite for fast fashion is pushing workers into starvation conditions
Once again the closet opens and the skeletons tumble out. Here are three of the most outwardly respectable high-street stores – including one that often waves around its world-saving plan and another assumed to have got its supply chain in order following exposés of working conditions in the 1990s – connected to miserable Gurgaon garment factories. None of the firms identified this time is a "value" retailer, but they too are in the grip of fast fashion – making on-trend designs mind-bogglingly cheaply and getting them into their stores in days, rather than months. And the real cost continues to be paid by garment workers thousands of miles away. Click here for the full story >>

Lessons from history show self-regulation to be the best kind of control
In their election document, the country's Catholic bishops – who are not known for their support of free market economics – pointed out: "A society that is held together just by compliance to rules is inherently fragile, open to further abuses which will be met by a further expansion of regulation.”  There is no point trying to avoid scandals and crises by having bureaucrats writing more and more rules. The key is a financial system where prudent behaviour runs with the grain of self interest. And we must not crowd out the private regulatory bodies that propelled the creation of sophisticated financial systems in the UK. The stock exchanges of the 19th and 20th centuries were all part of the "Big Society". If the Government really wants the Big Society to flourish again in this sector, it needs to roll back financial regulation, not draft more of it. (by Philip Booth, Cass Business School) Click here for the full story >>

US to pay big sums for Wall Street tip-offs
New US whistleblowing incentives within the Dodd-Frank financial reform act – that could net informants multimillion dollar pay-outs – are likely to generate a surge in allegations against US-listed companies and Wall Street banks, lawyers say.  The Securities and Exchange Commission is expecting a sharp increase in tip-offs from senior employees and third parties prompted by potential seven-figure bounties. “The scale of the awards reflects the high quality of whistleblower we hope to get – people within a company, broker or other regulated firm that we might not have heard from before,” Stephen Cohen, an SEC official, told the Financial Times. “We’re expecting a tremendous response.”  The substantive new financial incentives for securities fraud whistleblowers are part of the sweeping Wall Street reforms that became law last month. Click here for the full story >>

Non-execs in short supply
British companies are facing an acute shortage of non-executive directors, as new corporate governance rules drawn up after the financial crisis demand the more frequent replacement of board members, according to research by Norman Broadbent, the City headhunter. Click here for the full story >>

Elan pays $204 million epilepsy drug fine
Elan has agreed to pay a $204 million (£133 million) fine over its marketing practices for its anti-epilepsy drug Zonegran, in a settlement reached with US prosecutors. Elan was investigated for marketing the drug as a therapy for conditions for which it had not been approved. Elan has not disclosed what the nature of this marketing activity was, or what the unapproved conditions for which the drug was marketed were. Click here for the full story >>