News Coverage

Starwood Capital Group made a big bet on the U.S. retail market in November 2013. Barry Sternlicht’s private equity firm bought a 90 percent stake in seven malls from Westfield Group for $1.6 billion through an affiliated company.
Located in towns like Toledo, Ohio, and Olympia, Washington, the malls were filled with national brands and boasted an average occupancy rate of 96 percent — the kind of properties considered a very safe bet at the time.
But the retail market...

Freedom Mortgage Corp. lost separate bids to escape two putative class actions over allegedly unsolicited phone calls when a New Jersey federal judge ruled Thursday that the customers’ lawsuits supported their claims under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.
U.S. District Judge Jerome B. Simandle denied Freedom Mortgage’s motions to dismiss the proposed class actions alleging in part that the New Jersey-based business made such calls using an automatic telephone dialing...

Nowadays, whistleblowers are very much in the news. It was complaints from whistleblowers that precipitated the resignation of Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt. July 30 has been designated by the U.S. Senate as “National Whistle Blower Appreciation Day.”
But being a whistleblower is often not appreciated at the time the whistle is blown.
Martin Edwin Andersen is one example. Andersen has been a whistleblower for much of his life, repeatedly...

Long-term care insurance consumers -- usually upper-middle age and older Americans -- face enough hurdles in finding the best policies. Complicated contracts, high fees and charges, and booming premiums await any long-term care insurance buyer.
On top of that lurks another, more sinister issue for buyers, and it's one of the worst forms of elder fraud -- long-term care insurance fraud.
It's a big problem, given the skyrocketing costs of long-term care services these days, and the...

Signals from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over how seriously it takes cybersecurity, combined with a Supreme Court ruling on whistleblower protections, are putting pressure on companies to be more careful about how they deal with potential tipsters, lawyers say.
The securities regulator issued guidance in February on how companies should handle cybersecurity issues. In April it fined Altaba Inc., formerly Yahoo Inc., $35 million over its handling of a 2014 hack, marking the...

Latest Development: Uber Technologies Inc. faces a nationwide class action alleging the company illegally classifies its drivers as independent contractors and cheats them out of overtime wages and tips.

Potential Impact: The action could compel the courts to clarify whether gig economy companies such as Uber, Lyft, GrubHub, Upwork, Fiverr and Thumbtack can characterize their workers as independent contractors or traditional employees entitled to protections under federal labor laws....

• Claims taxpayer was warned by accountant of illegal conduct
• Appeal puts government at risk of losing first FBAR disclosure circuit court case

The CEO of a pharmaceutical manufacturing company acted recklessly when he failed to disclose a Swiss bank account he owned, and isn’t entitled to a refund on a penalty he paid for his failure, the government said....

Allied Home Mortgage Capital Corporation has lost a decade-long battle in a verdict that tripled damages from $93 million to $268 million on September 14. United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Joon H. Kim, announced an additional judgement of $25 million against Allied Capital President and CEO, Jim Hodge, for False Claims Act and FIRREA violations involving the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) mortgage insurance program.
Branch Manager Peter Belli Claims...

Hunton & Williams LLP has become the latest law firm to settle allegations that it aided Robert Allen Stanford’s $7 billion Ponzi scheme, inking a $34 million deal that would benefit some of Stanford’s thousands of victims.
With Stanford now five years into a 110-year federal prison sentence, ​Hunton's ​big-dollar settlement is a significant step in a swarm of suits that arose from the 2009 collapse of Stanford International Bank and other companies Stanford...

An Orlando woman alleges that she earns less than the minimum wage for her work with a national telephone sex-talk purveyor and has filed a class-action complaint.
Anne Cannon filed a complaint on behalf of all others similarly situated on June 27 in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California against Tele Pay USA alleging violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act.
According to the complaint, the plaintiff has been employed by the defendant since 2008 as an actor...