I have always talked about how Sarbanes-Oxley has turned out to be a licence to print money for accountants. The last time I did that was here. The question is whether that would continue if or when...

The fallout from the Société Générale implosion continues. Bloomberg reports that Standard & Poor's has downgraded the bank's long-term counterparty credit rating cut one level to AA-...

If you are looking around for ethical companies and business leaders, perhaps even scrounging around for some socially responsible investment, you could do worse than look at the latest edition of...

Hat tip to the Whistleblowers Protection website for alerting us to a court ruling that a former senior employee of global consulting firm Accenture, who was stationed in Paris, can sue for damages...

A huge scandal in Germany which is likely to roll right through the German corporate sector. Earlier during the week, German police raided the home and offices of Klaus Zumwinkel, the chief executive...

Thought provoking piece Criminalizing Capitalism from Nicole Gelinas on the limitations of Sarbanes-Oxley.Gelinas makes the point that Sarbanes-Oxley not only failed to stop the subprime meltdown...

The BAE bribery scandal grows grubbier by the day.As the Guardian reports, secret files show that Saudi Arabia's rulers threatened to make it easier for terrorists to pull off another attack on...

Credit crunch? Credit default swaps? Honeymoon loans? NINJA loans? Negative pledge? The subprime crisis is upon us and investors are confronted with jargon designed to baffle and keep them in the...

With Conrad Black, due to report to prison March 3, asking the court the delay the start of that sentence, spare a thought for his wife Barbara Amiel.Now that hubby is heading off to jail, Amiel is...

Late last month, I did a blog entry looking at Donald Trump's legal woes with Las Vegas property management company suing him for $4 billion, accusing The Donald of monopolistic practices,...

Warren Buffett triggered a Wall Street rally when he offered to bail out troubled bond insurers in the US. But when you look at the deal closer, it's actually better for Buffett and Berkshire...

With a US recession looming, the question is how bad is it going to get?Certainly a recession is now an even money bet, according to a Bloomberg news survey, with the US housing industry in trouble,...

Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia, the former Saudi ambassador to the US, has been one of the key figures in the BAE-Saudi bribery scandal. One of the biggest allegations was that Britain's Ministry...

Corporate raider and shareholder activist Carl Icahn plans to set up a corporate governance blog, according to news reports. There is nothing on The Icahn Report yet but Icahn says he plans to use...

In their haste to pass Sarbanes-Oxley into law following the spate of scandals headed up by Enron, politicians and regulators neglected to look carefully at the issue of whistleblowers. Who actually...

One of the great myths about management is that there are universal rules. There is a dogma, championed by American business schools, that there is only certain sure-fire ways to manage...

The long arm of international law is catching up with companies caught bribing. Not only have there been an increase in Foreign Corrupt Practices Act enforcement actions brought by the Department of...

At the beginning of this week, I did a blog entry looking at a court hearing into the proposed $50 million penalty for BP over its negligence that resulted in the 2005 Texas City refinery explosion...

At the end of last month I raised the question of why it had taken the Securities and Exchange Commission so long to tackle the subprime issue. It was at the time that the FBI announced it was...

Questions continue about what motivated Jérôme Kerviel, 31, the junior banker who bought Société Générale to its knees, costing it $7.2 billion with his wrong bets and fraud.The man himself has...