Weatherford is one of the world’s largest oilfield service companies, operating in over 100 countries.

In an unusual twist to the tale last year, Weatherford general counsel Burt Martin left his job in mid-probe, and the company decided to move its headquarters from Houston to Geneva, Switzerland. It still has U.S. operations in Houston.

The company conceded in its 10-Q financial report to the SEC on May 3 that the federal inquiry that began in 2006 has now grown to include the Department of Justice, the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry & Security, and the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control. The latter two agencies handle matters of national security.

The report said the feds are looking at allegations on three fronts. They include Weatherford’s participation in the scandal-plagued Oil-for-Food program, the possible misuse of $175,000 at a European subsidiary for alleged bribes in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and the sales of services and products “in certain sanctioned countries.”

It specifically cited Cuba, Iran, Sudan, and Syria — four countries under U.S. sanctions due to their support of terrorism and/or violations of human rights.

The company said it is cooperating with the multi-faceted probe. The report said it has incurred $53 million in costs related to its exit from sanctioned countries and incurred $108 million for legal and professional fees in connection with the ongoing investigations.

via U.S. Government’s FCPA Probe of Weatherford Expands.

Daimler’s delisting is the latest sign of German companies abandoning U.S. capital markets, opting instead to list solely in Frankfurt, re-fortified. The planned delisting and deregistration of Daimler AG is the latest in this months-long trend, propelled by the growth of Frankfurt and its Xetra electronic exchange, despite a weakening euro. It is also residual of Daimler’s bitter end in the Chrysler saga.

The carmaker announced its intention to “go dark” in a letter to the New York Stock Exchange, detailing its plans to delist its shares and to deregister with the SEC. As cited in a statement by Daimler, the primary reason for the planned listing is “a significant change in the behavior of international investors, who now primarily trade in Daimler shares in Germany and through electronic trading platforms.” Of note, however, Daimler, in its recent annual report, reported consistently low trading volumes in the United States, which amounted to well below 5% of the worldwide trading volume.

via Delisting Watch: Daimler the Latest to “Go Dark” in U.S..

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The SEC alleges that Goldman Sachs structured and marketed a synthetic collateralized debt obligation (CDO) that hinged on the performance of subprime residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS). Goldman Sachs failed to disclose to investors vital information about the CDO, in particular the role that a major hedge fund played in the portfolio selection process and the fact that the hedge fund had taken a short position against the CDO.

Investors are alleged to have lost more than $1 billion.

The SEC’s complaint charges Goldman Sachs and Goldman Sachs Vice President Fabrice Tourre with violations of Section 17(a) of the Securities Act of 1933, Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, and Exchange Act Rule 10b-5. The Commission seeks injunctive relief, disgorgement of profits, prejudgment interest, and financial penalties.

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via Civil Complaint for investment Fraud | Securities and Exchange Commission v Goldman, Sachs & Co. | Justia.com – JDSupra.

The Franco-American group said that it had reached agreements with the U.S. Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Committee under which it would pay fines, be put on a three-year probationary period, and be subject to a French anti-corruption monitor.

In exchange, the Department of Justice would defer prosecution of the company over charges that it violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act's anti-bribery provisions.

The accord must be approved by U.S. courts in order to take effect, according to a February 11 regulatory filing from Alcatel-Lucent.

“If finalized, the agreements would relate to alleged violations of the FCPA involving several countries, including Costa Rica, Taiwan, and Kenya,” said the company in the filing.

The investigation centered on an Alcatel executive Christian Sapsizian who pleaded guilty in 2007 to arranging for bribes to be paid to Costa Rican officials to obtain mobile contracts.

via Alcatel-Lucent signs deal with U.S. on bribery case | Reuters.

Microsoft must have listened because the new version Exchange 2010 includes substantial improvements to the “dumpster” and deleted item behavior and closed the potential “leak” for eDiscovery.

The new Exchange 2010 dumpster is a complete new design.  Here is a link if you want the complete story.

http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2009/09/25/452632.aspx

The new Exchange 2010 dumpster features that are key for legal discovery are:

-          The new dumpster now includes all deleted items from the mailbox including email, calendars, contacts, and more.  The old dumpster only included email.

-          The new dumpster is indexed so it can be searched using the new multi-mailbox search tool in Exchange 2010. The old dumpster was not indexed and could not be searched.

-          The new dumpster has been extended with new Purges and Versions folders.  Users can no longer bypass the dumpster behavior with a manual purge.

The Purges folder keeps items that users purge from the dumpster and keeps them for the length of the dumpster retention period.

The Versions folders keeps a copy-on-write snapshot of email that users modify.

The new Exchange 2010 dumpster still operates with a retention period (14 day default) or custom.  The new dumpster features are a welcome addition to Exchange.

By capturing all deleted items and by preventing users from purging email, it closes all of the  major “leaks” for email discovery and compliance.

via The New Exchange 2010 Dumpster | Email Archiving & Storage Management Experts.

E-mail archiving, e-discovery, regulatory compliance and security figure prominently in the new release, with features such as a Personal Archive, retention policies, legal hold, single-item restore, multi-mailbox search and access control.

Personal Archive is a special mailbox that appears alongside the primary mailbox folders in Outlook or Outlook Web App, so users have direct access to e-mail within the archive.

Exchange 2010 also offers new database availability, replication and failover capabilities for stronger disaster recovery, and storage I/O reductions and SATA and JBOD support reduce data storage costs.

Storage vendors such as EMC (NYSE: EMC), Dell (NASDAQ: DELL), Mimosa, Symantec (NASDAQ: SYMC), NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP), Seagate/i365 (NASDAQ: STX), Azaleos and NeverFail have pledged support for Exchange 2010.

Despite the new storage capabilities, Enterprise Strategy Group analyst Brian Babineau said the new release still leaves plenty of room for storage vendors.

“We believe that the latest version of Exchange, including its archiving and retention capabilities, actually drives the need for purpose-built archive solutions,” Babineau said. “It is readily apparent that Microsoft wants Exchange 2010 customers to manage everything — storage, data protection, retention, discovery, etc. — inside of Exchange. However, this can get very complicated when a company goes through a significant amount of discovery requests, has several large mailboxes, and a multitude of retention policies that must be enforced.

via Microsoft Adds E-mail Archiving to Exchange 2010 – www.enterprisestorageforum.com.

The company has reduced the monthly rates for its Business Productivity Online Suite BPOS which includes SharePoint from US$ 15 to US$ 10. They also dropped the monthly subscription for Exchange Online from US$ 10 to US$ 5.

In addition to the price reduction, BPOS is also available in Singapore, and soon India. BPOS will be available in over 36 countries by the end of this year and there are a number of new high profile organizations using the service. Trials are slated to begin in Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Czech Republic, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Israel, Malaysia, Mexico, Poland, Puerto Rico, Romania and Taiwan.

Its this adoption that is pushing the price of the online services down. According to Microsoft specifically, ““rapid customer adoption, global scale and improved efficiencies from new software such as Exchange Server 2010.”

via Microsoft Drops the Price for SharePoint Online.