The Securities and Exchange Commission in the United States are investigating the financial dealings of some of Hollywood’s biggest movie studios in China after information leaked that studio executives may have been making illegal payments to government officials in order to gain a stronger foothold into the Chinese market.
Royal Dutch Shell plc may be liable for more than $150 million in compensation to victims of a 2008 Nigerian oil spill, said a report by The Guardian on Monday, after a Amnesty International-commissioned study discovered that the damage caused had been more than 60 times what the energy company had originally claimed.
Citigroup shareholders have rejected a pay package that would have seen the bank’s chief executive receive $15 million a year, a major embarrassment for one of the world’s biggest banks. Citigroup’s chief executive, Vikram Pandit, received just $1 in 2010, and $128,741 in 2009.
Amid a backdrop of national discontent over obscene income inequality, Citigroup has become the first of Wall Street banking titans to get a veto from shareholders over supersized executive pay.
Wall Street’s Goldman Sachs has reported a higher than expected $2.1 billion profit for the first quarter of 2012, an outcome of the company reining in costs and risk-taking activities. However, analysts are saying that Goldman’s profits mask other problems, including a 16 percent decline in revenue.
South Korea’s Samsung Electronics is said to have, for the first time, overtaken Nokia’s 14-year leadership in global handset sales. According to a poll by analysts, Samsung sold 9 million handsets more than the Finnish company in the first quarter of 2012.
Bloomberg’s latest estimates show that Asia’s largest electronics maker, Samsung, may have shipped 92 million mobile phones, surpassing Nokia’s 83 million units for the first three months of 2012.
Despite having a cash reserve of almost $100 billion and soaring sales of its popular products like the iPhone, Apple saw its stock smacked with a rare downgrade yesterday. Why?
Apple is said to have an enviable problem: It has too much cash and does not know what to do with it. But last month, Apple announced it was planning a $10 billion stock buyback and a dividend payout for its investors, as the technology giant sought to return part of its $97.8 billion cash holdings to its shareholders.
Twenty-six Fortune 500 companies did not have to pay a single cent in federal income taxes over the last four years, wrote a report by consumer group Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy on Monday, with corporate tax breaks allowing some companies to actually make a profit from filing their taxes.
Germany’s competition watchdog, the Federal Cartel Office (FCO), is set to launch an inquiry against five major petrol companies for allegedly trying to drive independent petrol stations out of business through illegitimate pricing practices, said AFP on Wednesday.
The bank that bet big on a housing market crash in 2007/08, and profited from it, is about to place another bet on the US real-estate market. This time, Goldman Sachs is taking aim at a rebounding property market in the United States.
State-owned Chinese oil company PetroChina announced this Thursday that it pumped 2.4 million barrels of oil per day last year – overtaking Exxon Mobil’s 2.3 million bpd to be the world’s largest publicly traded producer of oil.
