World Business Briefing: Estonia: Settlements in S.E.C. Case
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An investment bank in Estonia, Lohmus Haavel & Viisemann, and a former worker agreed to pay $15 million to settle Securities and Exchange Commission allegations that they had made illegal trades based on information from stolen news releases. The former employee, Oliver Peek, will forfeit $13 million in profit and will pay a $1.35 million fine. The bank will pay a $650,000 penalty, the S.E.C. said. They neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing in agreeing to the sanctions. The S.E.C.âs lawsuit accused Lohmus Haavel, which is based in Tallinn, of using a computer program to retrieve information on more than 200 United States companies from Business Wireâs secure Web site before announcements were made public from January to November 2005.
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The European Union was ready to announce a settlement Tuesday of its long-running antitrust case against The Coca-Cola Co. after the beverage giant agreed to modify its sales practices in Europe, sources close to the talks said.
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A settlement between Coca-Cola and the European commission to end a long-running antitrust case over fizzy drinks has not been finalised, the European Union&#39;s executive said yesterday.
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Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of Federal District Court in Manhattan gave final approval to a $50 million partial settlement by Banca Nazionale del Lavoro of Italy and units of the Credit Suisse Group in an investor lawsuit over the collapse of the Italian dairy company Parmalat in 2003. Banca Nazionale and units of Credit Suisse each will pay $25 million and make corporate governance changes. The judge also approved expenses of $6 million for lawyers of the plaintiffs.
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The business development company said it had settled a four-year investigation by the S.E.C. into its valuation practices.
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NAIROBI, Sep 24  (IPS) - While east Africans still hold reservations about  the benefits of the economic partnership agreement (EPA)  currently being negotiated with the European Union (EU), both  government and civil society representatives seem to be accepting  that it is the best option available.
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Ernst & Young LLP ERNY.UL, one of  the four largest U.S. accounting firms, will pay a total of  $125 million to settle U.S. claims arising from its audits of a  failed Illinois savings bank, regulators and the company said  Friday.
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Officials from eastern Estonia made a serious case for Russian businesses to invest in their region, offering ready access to EU markets and low percentage bank loans as an incentive.
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Royal Dutch/Shell has agreed to pay $120 million to settle fraud charges with the S.E.C. involving overstated oil reserves, the U.S. securities regulator said today.
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BRUSSELS, Jan 30 (IPS) - Just one day after Kenya's bitterly disputed  presidential election took place in December, Nairobi received an  aid payment worth nearly 41 million euros (60.5 million dollars)  from the European Union.
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The Indian government has offered hi-tech cooperation to the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) Comtel project, a proposed private regional telecommunications company.ADVERTISEMENTWhite paper: Solutions to Address IT Control RequirementsLearn how BMC Software Solutions address requirements such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Section 404 in this 20 page whitepaper!
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(InfoWorld) - Two months after much of Estonia's online infrastructure wasÂ targeted by an online attack, the U.S government is sending cyberinvestigators to help the Baltic state better understand what happened. A representative from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's US-CERT (U.S. Computer Emergency Response Team) division is heading to Estonia this week to help analyze the large volume of data that was generated by the attacks, said Gregory Garcia, assistant secretary for cyber security and telecommunications with the DHS. "We are sending someone from our organization ... to help them with forensic analysis and to do some additional training on how to secure their infrastructure," he said. Additionally, a member of the U.S. Secret Service will be there to help with training on incident response and computer crime investigations, according to a DHS spokesman. In April, a widespread DDOS attack struck Estonia and affected government and banking Web sites. Early press reports linked the attacks to Russia, exacerbating tensions between the two countries, but investigators now say thatÂ it is unclear who exactly was behind the incident. "The data that we have does not speak to who's behind it. There's no smoking gun," said Jose Nazario, senior security engineer with Arbor Networks, who has studied the attacks. Unlike other Internet conflicts, the Estonian attacks do not seem to have been backed by a particular hacking group, said Gadi Evron, a security evangelist with Beyond Security. "They were of immense variety [and came] from the population of the Russian-speaking blogosphere," he said. Some attackers ran simple scripts on their PCs, while others trained sophisticated groups of botnet computers at the Estonian systems, Evron said. "Many of the attacks were from fake sources and compromised computers around the world," he added. During the incident, several international organizations helped the tiny country repel the online attacks, Garcia said. "This was -- at least in the aftermath -- a good news story in the sense that Estonia looked to NATO for assistance and together the NATO countries came to the aid of Estonia," Garcia said. "It showed that the relationships we have internationally and across the federal government are paying off so we can respond in real time to attacks that are happening." Garcia said that members of US-CERT could learn how the U.S. should respond if faced with a similar attack. "It's a little bit more complicated than conventional warfare," he said. "It's a little difficult to trace back where a particular attack is coming from, which makes it more difficult to respond." Arbor Networks' Nazario agreed that investigators will get a much clearer picture of how the attacks evolved over time. "They can basically learn what ... technologies and what techniques worked under those attacks," he said.
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A 20-year-old Estonian student has been fined for participating in&#160;a cyberattack that paralyzed Estonian Web sites&#160;and&#160;soured the country&#39;s relationship with Russia, a government official said Thursday.Dmitri Galushkevich used his home PC to launched a denial-of-service attack that knocked down the Web site for the political party of Estonia&#39;s prime minister for several days, said Gerrit Maesalu, spokesman for the Northeast District Prosecutor&#39;s Office in Tallinn, Estonia&#39;s capital. Galushkevich must pay 17,500 kroons ($1,642).Galushkevich is the only person who has been convicted since the cyberattack in April and May 2007 crippled the Web sites of banks, schools, and government agencies.The attacks occurred after the Estonian government decided to relocate a Soviet-era World War II memorial of a bronze soldier. Ethnic Russians in Estonia rioted in the streets, and cyberattacks ensued. Russia denied involvement.&quot;He [Galushkevich] wanted to show that he was against the removal of this bronze statue,&quot; Maesalu. &quot;At the moment, we don&#39;t have any other suspects.&quot;But police are still trying to find others who may have been involved in the attacks, although the investigation is complicated since the attackers are likely outside Estonia, Maesalu said.As the attacks were continuing, Estonian Defense Minister Jaak Aaviksoo called for stronger defenses in Europe against computer hackers.&#160;
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Ernst &amp; Young LLP will pay $40 million to the US Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and is finishing a settlement to pay $85 million to the Office of Thrift Supervision to settle a case involving
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Enrico Bondi is fast becoming Europe's answer to the U.S.'s Eliot Spitzer. Though a government-appointed bankruptcy administrator in Italy and not a state prosecutor, Bondi is following Spitzer's example by ...
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(InfoWorld) - As judgment day in the nine-year-long antitrust battle between Microsoft and the European Commission draws near, neither side in the protracted dispute knows for sure how it will react to the news on the day. Although the date of the ruling by the European Court of First Instance has been public since July, the European commissioner in charge of competition, Neelie Kroes, still hasn't decided whether she will hold a press conference on Monday. Meanwhile, Tom Brookes, a Microsoft spokesman, said the company is waiting until Monday morning before finalizing plans for addressing the rank's journalists from around the world gathering in Luxembourg, the court's location, and Brussels and who are eager to place "winner" and "loser" tags on the adversaries. "How much can you prepare for an outcome you don't know?" Brookes said. "Clearly Mrs. Kroes isn't going to give a press conference if the Commission loses outright," said Commission spokesman Jonathan Todd. Microsoft's appeal against the Commission's 2004 antitrust ruling is the biggest event in the working lives of everyone directly involved. They know that Monday's outcome will influence the software industry's future and will be a reference in all future European antitrust cases, especially ones in the fast-changing world of IT. From Microsoft's perspective, it will determine "under what circumstances market-leading companies can improve their products for consumers," said Erich Andersen, vice president and associate general counsel for Microsoft in Europe, in a statement. "The issue here is whether Microsoft should be able to regulate the market from a superdominant position, or whether the market should determine which products should gain access to consumers," countered Todd in a telephone interview. Both sides also know that how the outcome is perceived in the press is almost as important as the actual outcome, which is likely to be hundreds of pages in length, devilishly nuanced, and highly complex. Most people expect several versions of the court ruling to appear in the media on Monday. Initial reports will emerge shortly after the ruling is made public at 9:30 a.m. local time, and will probably focus on whether the Commission has to repay any or all of the â¬497 million ($685 million) fine it imposed on Microsoft in 2004. Repaying the fine will be seen as evidence that Microsoft's appeal against the 2004 Commission ruling was successful. Letting the fine stand will be viewed as a Microsoft loss. But what happens to the fine is the least important aspect of Monday's ruling, according to Thomas Vinje, a partner in the law firm Clifford Chance, who heads the legal team of the European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS), a Commission ally. "It's the least relevant yardstick," Vinje said. "Far more important is how the judges assess individual facts and points of law because this will determine what legal precedents can be gleaned from this case." A senior lawyer on Microsoft's side agreed. "If the court reduces the fine on Microsoft, saying that the anticompetitive behavior isn't so serious, but upholds the Commission's broad argument, then a lawyer in a year's time dealing with a different antitrust case will be more interested in what the court specifically said than in whether the fine was reduced or not," he said, asking not to be named. Journalists will largely be dependent on lawyers' interpretations of the document, which won't come out until some time after the initial ruling. The story may well change dramatically during the day, once details of the ruling emerge, possibly even reversing a superficial initial assessment of who won or lost. The finest legal minds involved on both sides will pore over the document looking for ways to claim victory and to shape perceptions of the ruling. Microsoft appealed both strands in the Commission's landmark 2004 ruling, which concluded that Microsoft was abusing the dominant position of its Windows operating system in order to muscle in on other sectors of the software market. The Commission concluded that Microsoft was competing unfairly against other vendors by bundling its Media Player multimedia software in Windows. The Commission also ruled that Microsoft monopolized the market for low-end server operating systems by failing to reveal interoperability information to rivals. Last April the court held a three-day hearing during which the Commission and Microsoft, together with their software industry allies, tried to convince the judges of their arguments. Observers foresee four possible outcomes on Monday, the first two clear-cut but unlikely, the other two mixed and therefore more probable. The court could side with the Commission on both sides of the case. It might deem Microsoft an obstacle to innovation in the software industry and order the immediate breakup of the company, effectively appropriating the Windows operating system and making it a public utility. In the second clear-cut scenario, the court sides with Microsoft on both counts and declares that the rapidly changing IT industry is defined by a string of monopolies and that one monopoly is inevitably overtaken by another in time. More likely, the court may side with the Commission on the interoperability side but uphold Microsoft's appeal against the bundling ruling. Microsoft may be ordered to release all interoperability information to rivals immediately. This result would open up Office-related markets to open source software rivals. However, Microsoft would no longer need to sell a version of Windows without Media Player, and it would most probably bundle more and more features onto Windows in the future, to the likely detriment of any halfway successful innovation from a rival, such as Google. Alternatively, Microsoft may lose the bundling argument but win on the interoperability side. The Court may order Microsoft to set up a separate company to sell a completely unbundled version of Windows. This entity would be free to compete with the fully bundled version and strike partnerships with other software developers. If the third scenario prevails, then Microsoft could face a string of lawsuits in Europe. The Commission is already examining an ECIS complaint that claims Microsoft has stifled competition in the market for office tools software by failing to allow rival software from interoperating properly with Microsoft Office. "Victory on the interoperability side of the case on Monday would put wind in our sails," said the ECIS's Vinje. But a loss would put a swift end to a new attack, and any others that might lie in waiting for Monday's outcome. "Monday's ruling will have a huge effect on how the ECIS complaint is dealt with," Todd said.
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LUXEMBOURG, Sept. 30 -- European regulators testified here Thursday that before settlement talks with Microsoft Corp. broke down last spring, the company had agreed to  antitrust sanctions that the software giant now claims would cause irreparable harm to its business and is fighting to stave off.