Category Archives: Legal News

Blog, Divorce, Family, Legal News

Amber Heard Files for Divorce From Johnny Depp

Actress Amber Heard filed for divorce from Johnny Depp, citing irreconcilable differences after 15 months of marriage.

She is seeking spousal support from the Oscar-nominated actor.

Heard listed their date of separation as Sunday in a filing in Los Angeles Superior Court. They have no children together.

Depp and Heard met while co-starring in the 2011 film “The Rum Diary.” Depp’s latest film, “Alice Through the Looking Glass,” is due to be released on Friday.

The pair made global headlines last year when they ran into legal trouble for bringing their Yorkshire terriers, Pistol and Boo, into Australia as Depp was filming the latest “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie.

Heard was charged with two counts of illegally importing the pets and one count of producing a false document last July. A magistrate judge in April filed no conviction for Heard but issued a formal order to stay out of trouble for a month or face a $767 fine.

The breach in border security sparked what was gleefully dubbed the “war on terrier,” and culminated in the pair recording a deadpan apology that was likened to a hostage video. Throughout the saga Depp engaged in a war of words with Australian Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce, who’d threatened to kill the dogs.

Earlier this week, Joyce boasted that he had gotten inside Depp’s head like fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter after the actor quipped that the ruddy-faced lawmaker appeared to be “inbred with a tomato” during an interview on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”

Depp has one previous marriage and was in a long relationship with French actress and model Vanessa Paradis before he began dating Heard. Depp and Paradis are the parents of two teenage children.

The divorce was first reported Wednesday by celebrity website TMZ.

Sourced From – http://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/celebrity/amber-heard-files-divorce-johnny-depp-n580661

Blog, Business Law, International, Legal News

Google faces record three billion euro EU antitrust fine: Telegraph

Google (GOOGL.O) faces a record antitrust fine of around 3 billion euros ($3.4 billion) from the European Commission in the coming weeks, British newspaper The Sunday Telegraph said.

The European Union has accused Google of promoting its shopping service in Internet searches at the expense of rival services in a case that has dragged on since late 2010.

Several people familiar with the matter told Reuters last month they believed that after three failed attempts at a compromise in the past six years Google now had no plans to try to settle the allegations unless the EU watchdog changed its stance.

The Telegraph cited sources close to the situation as saying officials planned to announce the fine as early as next month, but that the bill had not yet been finalised.

Google will also be banned from continuing to manipulate search results to favour itself and harm rivals, the newspaper said.

The Commission can fine firms up to 10 percent of their annual sales, which in Google’s case would be a maximum possible sanction of more than 6 billion euros. The biggest antitrust fine to date was a 1.1 billion-euro fine imposed on chip-maker Intel (INTC.O) in 2009.

The Commission and Google both declined to comment.

($1 = 0.8841 euros)

Full Article – http://www.reuters.com/article/us-google-eu-idUSKCN0Y60J4

Blog, Business Law, Criminal, International, Legal News, Organized Crime

Here are all the notable people we’ve found in the Panama Papers so far

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) published a huge database on Monday detailing how some of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful people legally hide their cash — dubbed the “Panama Papers.”

The database consists of more than 200,000 companies, trusts, foundations, and funds incorporated in 21 countries and countless names of the wealthy people who shelter their cash there.

The findings of the so-called Panama Papers investigation were first unveiled at the beginning of April.

Over 11 million documents held by the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca had been leaked to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. The paper shared the information with the ICIJ, which is made up of 107 media organizations in 78 countries.

The global news outlets examined 28,000 pages of documents, also revealing the full scale of the tax breaks won by 340 companies. The ICIJ published this statement on its website along with the documents:

There are legitimate uses for offshore companies and trusts. We do not intend to suggest or imply that any persons, companies or other entities included in the ICIJ Offshore Leaks Database have broken the law or otherwise acted improperly.

Business Insider scanned the database, which includes data both from the Panama Papers and a 2013 report called “Offshore Leaks,” for newsworthy or prominent people or organizations in the worlds of finance, politics, technology, and others.

We have taken a spider map for the individual’s holdings as an example. Each green dot represents an offshore entity with associations to the individual:

This post is being updated as new information is available.

  • Janie and Victor Tsao, the Taiwanese founders of data-networking company Linksys, had multiple entries in the Panama Papers for a joint trust and individually.

  • Raj Rajaratnam, the billionaire founder of hedge fund Galleon Group, was found in the database. Rajaratnam was sentenced to an 11-year prison sentence in 2011 on nine counts of securities fraud and five counts of conspiracy.

  • The Trustees of Columbia University appear in the database, linked to a corporation in the Cayman Islands. The university has an endowment of over $9.5 billion.

  • New York University School of Medicine appears in the database as the “master client” of several offshore entities.

  • Tiger Global, a New York-based hedge fund, is named in the database.

  • Charles Xue, a Chinese-American investor and social-media commentator, was named in the database. Xue was arrested in 2013 in China on suspicion of soliciting prostitutes in a case many saw as retaliation for his outspoken persona online.

  • Christian Gunnar Sachs, son of photographer and art collector Gunter Sachs, was revealed in the initial Panama Papers leaks to have set up offshore trusts.

  • Neil Gaitely is listed as the owner of Tamalaris Consolidated, which was reported to be a front for an Iranian state-controlled shipping line.

  • Eugene Kashper, entrepreneur and CEO of Pabst Brewing Co., was found in the database.

  • Sanjay Sethi, the owner of San Vision Technologies was found in the database. Sethi plead guilty to conspiring to defraud the US by hiding nearly $5 million from the IRS in 2013.

  • Leonard Gotshalk, former NFL player for the Atlanta Falcons who was later indicted on charges of tech-company stock manipulation.

Will be updated and sourced from – http://www.businessinsider.com/notable-people-named-in-panama-papers-2016-5

Blog, Business Law, Criminal, International, Legal News

China’s Google is being told to stop ranking results based on the fees it charges

China’s internet regulator has ordered the country’s biggest search engine to change how it handles medical advertisements and stop ranking results largely by the fees it charges, as the government wrapped up an investigation prompted by the death of a student with cancer.

Baidu said it would make the necessary changes and establish a billion-yuan fund to compensate consumers who suffered from misleading adverts hosted on its site.

The paramilitary force’s ­hospital in Beijing, where the ­student received treatment, was found to have violated regulations on outsourcing some ­specialist departments, and to have made false claims in medical ­advertisements.

The inquiry came after a public outcry over the death of Wei Zexi, 21, who sought cancer treatment at the No 2 Beijing Armed Police Hospital, which topped his Baidu search. Wei and his family paid 200,000 yuan (HK$240,000) for the treatment but it did not save him. Doctors say the immunotherapy treatment he received is still in the experimental stage.

Health authorities, officials from the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) and the State Administration for Industry and Commerce launched the joint investigation into the search engine and the hospital last week.

The CAC found Baidu’s business model – which allows advertisers who pay a fee to be featured more prominently in search ­results – had affected Wei’s choice of treatment.

Baidu must go through all medical advertisements shown in its search results and remove those by medical institutions that had not been qualified by regulators, the CAC said.

The company must change its search result model, as the listings returned were determined by fees the companies paid, the authorities said.

It also required Baidu to provide distinctive labeling for sponsored search results, which should account for no more than 30 per cent of results displayed on a page.

Additionally, the company would need to establish a mechanism through which people who suffered losses from misleading adverts found on the site could claim compensation, it said.

The company said it would alter its search engine operations and advertisement rankings as suggested, and set up the compensation fund.

The national health commission and the military’s health bureaus ordered the hospital to terminate its partnership with the private Shanghai Claison Bio-tech, which provided the experimental cancer treatment.

The hospital should clean up similar outsourcing deals with other private contractors. The hospital and its private contractors must immediately stop advertising.

Read Full Article – http://www.businessinsider.com/chinas-google-is-being-ordered-to-change-its-results-ranking-2016-5

Blog, Business Law, Criminal, Drug Companies, Legal News, Supreme Court

Study: There’s no scientific basis for laws regulating marijuana and driving

WASHINGTON (AP) — Six states that allow marijuana use legal tests to determine driving while impaired by the drug that have no scientific basis, according to a study by the nation’s largest automobile club that calls for scrapping those laws.

The study commissioned by AAA’s safety foundation said it’s not possible to set a blood-test threshold for THC, the chemical in marijuana that makes people high, that can reliably determine impairment.

Yet the laws in five of the six states automatically presume a driver guilty if that person tests higher than the limit, and not guilty if it’s lower.

As a result, drivers who are unsafe may be going free while others may be wrongly convicted, the foundation said.

The foundation recommends replacing the laws with ones that rely on specially trained police officers to determine if a driver is impaired, backed up by a test for the presence of THC rather than a specific threshold. The officers are supposed to screen for dozens of indicators of drug use, from pupil dilation and tongue color to behavior.

The foundation’s recommendation to scrap the laws in Colorado, Montana, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Washington comes as legislatures in several more states consider adopting similar laws.

At least three states, and possibly as many as eleven, will vote this fall on ballot measures to legalize marijuana for either recreational or medicinal use, or both. Several legislatures are also considering legalization bills.

“There is understandably a strong desire by both lawmakers and the public to create legal limits for marijuana impairment in the same manner we do alcohol,” said Marshall Doney, AAA’s president and CEO. “In the case of marijuana, this approach is flawed and not supported by scientific research.”

Determining whether someone is impaired by marijuana, as opposed to having simply used the drug at some time, is far more complex than the simple and reliable tests that have been developed for alcohol impairment.

There’s no science that shows drivers become impaired at a specific level of THC in the blood. A lot depends upon the individual. Drivers with relatively high levels of THC in their systems might not be impaired, especially if they are regular users, while others with relatively low levels may be unsafe behind the wheel.

Full Article – http://www.businessinsider.com/study-theres-no-scientific-basis-for-laws-regulating-marijuana-and-driving-2016-5